


strays

by theappleppielifestyle



Category: The Avengers (Marvel) - All Media Types
Genre: Alcohol Abuse/Alcoholism, Alternate Universe - High School, F/M, Implied/Referenced Child Abuse, M/M, basically they all need therapy
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-03-02
Updated: 2014-03-02
Packaged: 2018-01-14 05:56:33
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 24
Words: 85,812
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1255417
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/theappleppielifestyle/pseuds/theappleppielifestyle
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Tony will take whatever he can get from Steve, which is pathetic, because he’s not even really <i>friends</i> with him.</p><p>Or, the highschool!AU where Pepper is Tony's much-needed therapist, Darcy is his parter in crime, Bruce needs to go through puberty, Clint shows up to school with bruises and Steve just wants everyone to get through this intact.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> Long story short- I posted this. About a year after that, I deleted it. Now I'm re-posting it. Hope you enjoy it!

Ever since Tony decided that he was at least semi-officially a slut, he had developed a worrying, if not slightly obsessive relationship with dental hygiene. Which is why he’s pissed off- or, it’s at least one of the main contributing factors towards it- when he ends up on the floor with a mouthful of blood thirty seconds after the bell rings.

“Ow,” he says, and thinks about wiping the blood off with his sleeve, but then goes with the theatrical option and spits it onto the tiles.

Because that’s what this is about, right? Theatrics. They’re both playing a role, if this is who he thinks it is-

“Get up,” the familiar voice says, and Tony doesn’t even have to look towards Darcy to know that she’s rolling her eyes at the both of them.

Tony grins, pushing blood through his teeth with his tongue. “Hey, _Beef_.”

Clint gives him a warning look, like, _dude,_ _don’t screw this up_. “I said get up.”

“Yeaaah,” Tony says, drawing it out and letting it roll around his mouth. “I’m fine down here, thanks. Thought I’d have a kip on the floor, actually, thanks for reminding me.”

“Fucking weirdo,” one of Clint’s flanking guys says, stage-whispering it to the others so they snigger.

Tony sighs loudly. “Well, now that you’ve obviously beat me with your cunning and cutting wit, could you kindly piss off? We’ll be late for the bus if you try to damage my pretty, pretty face any more than you already have.”

He can feel the blood welling under his bottom lip, oozing down his chin in a way, which, with the split lip, which probably isn’t making him look wildly attractive unless you have a thing for it, which Tony doesn’t. Sadly.

“You guys go,” Clint says, and Tony watches as he puffs out his shoulders in that too-loose, too-worn leather jacket. “I’ll tell him what’s what.”

Tony mouths at him, _you sound like a knob_ , and bites down on a smile when he gets another glare in response.

One of the guys- Skeet, he’s pretty sure, because he has him in English class and that’s what he makes everyone call him- digs his elbow into Beef’s arm. “Man, really? We ca-”

“Do you _think_ ,” Clint grates, “I can’t handle this _fag_ on my own?”

Tony raises his eyebrows at him, finally wiping the blood away and trying not to think about how much a new shirt is going to cost, but it gets the job done: the others all glance uncertainly at each other.

“Nah, man, sorry,” Skeet says, shrugging quickly, leaning back. “We’ll just- see you tomorrow, Beef.”

“See you,” Clint says, jerking his head at them.

Skeet looks over at Darcy, who smiles icily. His lip curls upwards. “See you, _Jugs_.”

“Bye, assholes,” Darcy replies, one hand on the strap of her bag and the other pulling the finger.

They hoot, and one of them punches Clint lightly on the shoulder, saying something about _go get some,_ before turning around and heading down the hall.

“Philistines,” Tony calls after them, and Clint discreetly stomps on his foot as the guys look back over their shoulders.

“Shut it,” Clint hisses out of the corner of his mouth, and Tony swallows his reply until the others turn back.

As soon as they turn the corner, Darcy pushes herself off of the lockers and comes towards them, arms folded. “That was fucking harsh.”

“Yeah,” Clint says, bending down and taking Tony’s hand when he holds it out. He hauls him up, and Tony watches as ‘Beef’ dissolves back into ‘Clint,’ losing the sneer and gaining a hangdog look. “Sorry.”

“No problem.” Tony drags his hand across his mouth again, down under his chin, along his neck. “But you could’ve gone for somewhere that doesn’t get blood all over my shirt, _God_. You know I stake everything on my face, right? No-one’s going to want to make out with a bruised, bloodied, albeit gorgeous guy.”

“Next time,” Clint promises, leaning over to pick up Tony’s bag.

Tony takes it, slinging one strap over his shoulder. “Can’t wait. Shake on it?”

He holds out his pinkie, and Clint’s smile makes him wonder, for at least the thousandth time since freshmen year, why the hell he does this.

And how everyone actually swallows it- there’s almost a tangible difference between _Clint_ and _Beef_ , and quite honestly, if Beef smiles like he’s doing now in front of the people who cringe away from him when he walks down the halls, they’d see through the ‘Beef’ act every time.

“Next time I punch you in the face,” Clint says, squeezing their pinkies together quickly before dropping his hand, “I’ll catch you somewhere that doesn’t make you bleed. But it has to look good.”

Tony extends his arm to his locker door, pressing it closed properly, which he had been doing before he had been punched. “You know what? We should learn that fake-punching thing everyone does in movies.”

Clint pauses as Darcy falls into step beside them, heading for the buses out back instead of the school bus out the front where they know the others will be. “That’s- could we do that?”

“We could try. How hard could it be? I make the face, do the noises, Darcy stands in the back and makes the smacking sound-“

“You put too much effort into this,” Darcy says distractedly, raising a hand to wave at someone Tony can’t see unless he turns his head, which he honestly can’t be bothered doing at the moment, because everything hurts and he’s still swallowing blood every few seconds.

He tongues at the split where one of his molars had cut into his cheek at the impact of Clint’s fist, and winces.

Clint catches it. His face tightens, and he says, “Seriously, I’m sorry-”

Tony shrugs, one hand pressing gingerly against his jaw as he tries to judge the swelling, the other hand rooting around in his pocket.  “‘S fine. My fault for not remembering that you were supposed to do it after the bell.” He stops, still poking at it with his tongue, his hand closing on empty air. “Actually, scrap that, it’s totally your fault and I hate you. You can either grovel madly at my feet, or-“

“You forgot your bus money, didn’t you?”

Tony pushes out his bottom lip, making the already swelling bruises look worse than they already are, and his hand comes out of his pocket, sadly empty, and makes jazz hands.

Clint snorts before he can stop himself. “I’ll pay for you. Shit, you always milk this.”

“You _punched me in the face_.”

Darcy slings her arm over his shoulder, and bumps her hand against Clint’s forearm so quickly it could be accidental. “Bitch, bitch, bitch. You’re the dumbass who agreed to it.”

“I’m helping him keep up appearances,” Tony says, and it tastes stale from all the times he’s said it, all the times they’ve all said it, all the times they’ve avoided each other in the halls, all the times they haven’t helped each other up until everyone else had left. “He doesn’t have to punch some innocent bystander, and I go and find someone who’s into this kind of stuff. It’s a win-win.”

“Sure,” Darcy says.

Tony bumps against her arm. “Scars are sexy, right?”

“Fuck yes,” she says, and a clump of dirt comes loose as she kicks it. “But bruises aren’t.”

“Like I said, I’ll find someone.”

“That’ll be an interesting Craigslist entry.”

“Ha, ha,” Tony says, ducking out under from her arm so he can get into the bus without being crushed against the side of the door, stepping out of the way to get paid for.

There are only about seven other people on the bus, and most of them are in the back. Tony nods at Natasha, who doesn’t nod back, but blows a smoke ring in his direction.

Tony slides into a window seat before Darcy can, dropping his bag between his feet. She kicks his ankle, ignoring his yelp, before sitting down next to him in the aisle seat.

Clint takes the seat behind them, and glances back to check who’s in the bus before leaning forwards. “And sorry about calling you, uh. Yeah.”

Tony glances back at him, craning his neck. “How many times do I have to tell you it’s fine? It’s not _real_ , you’re playing a part.”

It’s sort of uncomfortable, how often they go over this, and how unstable it sounds when he says it, like it’s going to fall apart unless they keep holding it up.

“And besides,” Tony says as the bus jerks forwards, “I’ve been called worse. Slut, queer-”

“You don’t need to go through the entire list-”

“-fag, man-whore, cheating bastard-”

“Oh my god, we’ll be here all day-”

Darcy slots her hand over Tony’s mouth, her smile too loose. “Yes, we all know you fuck around, you adorable British slut, you. Stop yelling it to the world.”

“Never,” Tony says into her palm, muffled. He licks her hand, and her nails dig into his cheeks.

She finally remembers the new bruises when Tony flinches involuntarily, and her hand bolts back into her lap. “Fuck. Sor-”

Tony lets his forehead drop to the seat in front of him, and it jolts when the bus goes over a pothole. “Why is everyone _apologizing_? What have I said about apologizing? We don’t apologize, it’s awkward and overdone and all it does is makes things worse, ugh, shut up.”

He knows they’re both sharing a look without even checking, so he lets his head rest on the seat for a few seconds before straightening up. “Aspirin. I need aspirin. I got punched in the face, therefore I need aspirin. Aspirin is good. Aspirin will fix things.”

“You know, there are times when I think you just let your mouth keep going while your brain turns off.”

“I am shocked and insulted by that horrendous insinuation, Clint.” Tony stretches his shoulders backwards until he hears a pop, and ignores the look he gets from both of them for it. “So, do either of you lovely pe-”

“For some reason,” Darcy says, “we don’t carry painkillers around in our bags.”

“Why not? That’s stupid. You should try to keep them handy, in case someone comes up and punches you in the face.”

“You _agreed_ ,” Clint says, too loud, and they all stop for a second, looking back at the other people on the bus.

None of them have seemed to notice the conversation, but there’s a guy who looks a few years too young to have stubble that has a full-grown beard, and he’s looking at them disinterestedly before turning back to take a cigarette from the girl next to him.

Usually they keep everything quiet: Darcy and Tony not making eye contact with Clint, least of all talking to him- but things have slipped through the cracks. Accidentally smiling at each other when something happens in class, not taking Tony up on it whenever he gets too cocky, being too friendly when they shouldn’t.

“Pepper will have some,” Darcy says, and Tony pretends not to see how her eyes keep flickering down to check the swelling. “Try not to bleed the fuck out and die before then.”

Tony smiles, but the throbbing in his mouth has only gotten worse since getting up off the floor. His lips feel heavy, like he should be slurring. “Duly noted.”

They sit in silence for the rest of the bus ride, and Darcy shares an earbud with Clint, who leans his head against the window so no-one sees the wire running between them.

Tony watches them both, and realizes that from here, the only telltale sign is her quiet humming along, and Clint tapping the same staccato beat against the hole in the knee of his jeans.

 

Really, Tony should be put off by the fact that one of his closest friends is paid monthly via massive checks that his dad writes out.

But when Pepper opens the door, her hair in a slick mess down her collar, her sweatpants sagging around her waist, and he can’t bring himself to care about said massive checks.

He steps inside and closes the door behind him, shrugging off his jacket. “Popcorn?”

“Rice,” she replies, bunching her hair up and twisting a hairtie around it. “Microwave. Go.”

He makes a face, toeing off his shoes and leaving them in a trail behind him as he heads to the microwave. “Why are we out of popcorn?”

“We’re not.” Pepper drops down onto the couch and leans over, feeling around for the remote on the ground instead of walking the six inches to grab the other one. “I felt like rice.”

“Sure, but why rice?”

“I felt like it,” Pepper repeats, lifting her feet up onto the couch and lifting up her ponytail so it drapes over the end of the couch when she lies down. “And I’m the responsible adult here, so shut up and get a bowl.”

Tony pushes the button on the microwave so it dings and unlocks, and opens the cupboard door.

“One bowl,” Pepper calls from the lounge. “We can eat it with separate forks. I don’t want to wash any more dishes than I need to.”

“You don’t want to wash one extra bowl?”

“Hey, unless you want to do the washing up-”

Tony bends down and puts the other bowl back, and starts to pour the rice into it before realizing that it’s not going to work. “It’s not big enough. Your bowls are pitifully tiny. I’d be ashamed if I was a bowl.”

She flops his hand at him. “Use the fruit bowl, then.”

“There’s fruit in it.”

“Really?” She frowns, genuinely confused, looking over at him.

He tilts the bowl towards her, showing her the half a dozen lemons and three limes.

“So there is.” She waves her hand again, and lies back down. “Those were probably for the vodka. No wonder I don’t remember it. Tip them into the pitiful bowl that I am now horrifically ashamed of, even though I’m not a bowl, and use the fruit bowl for the rice.”

It hurts to smile, but he does anyway. He tips the rice in the tiny bowl back into the bag, and narrowly avoids spilling the lemons across the bench when he puts them in.

He wipes the bottom of the fruit bowl with his shirt, keeping clear of the blood- on his shirt, not the bowl- and tips the rice into it.

He reaches over to the drying rack, grabbing two forks that are reasonably dry, albeit slightly soggy, and wipes them on his shirt before sticking them both in the rice and picking up the bowl.

He’s 99% sure this isn’t allowed- being this close with your therapist, that is. Having a key to her house on his keychain, knowing that she hates her mother and never knew her father, knowing what she looks like when she’s wasted with a sloppily-done mud mask on at 3 in the morning.

Which, by the way, is hilarious.

And he’s 100% sure she’d get fired if he told anyone that they stopped having sessions at her office three years ago and started coming over to her house, because it was easier, they both hated her office, and here they can watch movies on her flatscreen, which is the most expensive object in her entire house.

Tony had first met her five years ago, when he was eleven and she was twenty-two and had just got her licence. He had been enrolled in therapy because his dad (who comes around every two months or so to pay for the bills, booze and a haircut, before going off on another business trip) got forced into it by a counsellor at Tony’s old school, since apparently moving countries is ‘taxing on a child’s mental/emotional development.’

They had bonded over their unnecessary use of big words to freak people out, their shared hatred for therapy- she had only gone into it because she also hates everything else, and this way she had proof that everyone else’s life sucks more than hers does- and that they had both just moved to America from England.

 _Bonded over Britishness_ , they say sometimes, and grin.

Granted, it should be weird- she’s more than a decade older than him and doesn’t seem to have many other friends than the elusive ‘Maria and Sif’ that Tony has met twice while they were both fighting over who would get to puke in a toilet bowl and who would get the sink- but again, Tony can’t bring himself to care.

Besides, she’s pretty much the only British person he knows, and he gets to make all the jokes around her that no-one else gets, because everyone else is American and therefore only care about hamburgers and string cheese. And Snooki.

He sets the rice down on the coffee table, not bothering to worry when the glass wobbles, because it’s one of the strongest tables he’s ever come across, and that counts ones that are made of steel. He’s honestly expecting it to shatter when one of them props their feet up on it. They’ve run into it, tripped over it, kicked it, danced on it, and Tony can’t see how glass that thin can realistically take that much abuse without breaking into a million pieces.

She grunts, and heaves herself so her feet are flat on the floor and her back is straight. “Since I’m responsible for your mental health, or whatever, I’m required by law to ask how your day was.”

“If it helps, I promise not to go on a shooting spree.”

“That does help, actually. I’m declaring you sane at the moment, and I don’t want to damage my credibility by fouling it up with my favourite client.”

Tony slings his feet up on the coffee table, prodding it experimentally with his toe first to see if today’s the day it finally gives it up and splits down the middle. “You just say that because you get to go home early.”

“You’re the only one who actually gives me a stimulating conversation to work with,” Pepper says, and yawns widely, covering her mouth. “The bad movies and greasy foods are perks. You didn’t answer my question.”

Tony watches half of the rice fall off her fork before answering. “It was lovely. Glad times were had by all. You?”

She perks up, like she’s just remembered, and the rice spirals down her shirt. “I brought some shoes! You want to see the pretty shoes I brought?”

“Not in the slightest.”

“You,” she says, picking a grain of rice off a button and picking it off her finger with her tongue, “are the most boring bi kid I’ve ever met. There’s got to be a side of the rebellious gay guy in you, screaming to let him out and let him see the shoes-”

“That’s offensive in a billion and three different ways,” Tony says flatly, “and because I am a mature and sensible person, I’m not going to make a comment about having a guy inside me.”

Pepper’s hand flies to her mouth as she laughs, and then half-chokes on the rice. “Good idea. People might think I’m a bad influence. Oh, and I learned how to punch properly.”

“That’s worrying. You’re worrying.”

“You can talk. Okay, so you have to put your thumb like-”

She curls her hand into a fist, untucking her thumb from inside it and pressing it under her knuckles.

Tony nods, forking rice into his mouth and trying not to wince when the fork brushes against one of the splits. “Yeah, I saw that on TV.”

She glances over at him, and then looks back at her arm. “And you draw back, and when you punch, you twist your arm, like- and bend your elbow a bit, obviously, don’t make your arm too straight, otherwise you’ll break it.”

She mimes another punch into a cushion, and Tony nods again. “Thanks, but I think if I was ever in a situation where I needed to punch someone, I wouldn’t think strategy. I’d probably just flail out and slap them. Or kick them in the balls.”

“Good man,” she says. “Hey, _speaking_ of punching, your face looks like mashed potato. Do I need to go beat someone up? Or call their parents? Calling their parents would probably be the responsible adult thing to do, b-”

“It’s nothing,” Tony says. “It was-I told Clint he could pull his whole ‘Beef’ act on me, so he didn’t have to punch some poor freshman instead. It’s a status thing.”

When he risks a look at her, she’s looking back at him with her fork in her mouth, her eyebrows raised. “Have I ever told you that your relationship with just about all of your friends are really, really unhealthy?”

“Like my relationship with you?”

She wrinkles her nose. “Ugh. Don’t go there. You’re actually my most normal friend, if you can believe it. And our relationship might be a tad unhealthy, but all the interesting ones are.”

She nudges him with her bare foot, grinning, and he skims the end of his fork along her toes, poking it into her heel.

“Speaking of unhealthy relationships,” she says, twisting her foot underneath her, “How’s whatshisface?”

It’s probably sad that Tony knows who she’s talking about. “Hey, do you have any aspirin? I want some aspirin. For my face. Which is currently screwed to shit.”

She gives him the side-eye, but points her fork towards the cupboard. “Third shelf, behind the various liquor bottles which you’re still not allowed to touch.”

He pushes himself up off the couch, putting his fork back on the bench as he passes. “And _that’s_ going to stop me drinking. Which, by the way, is so hypocritical I think I might actually faint the next time-”

“I may be a bad influence,” Pepper says into her rice, “but you can get pissed off your face with your _own_ alcohol. Do you have any idea how much that costs? No, to the right- the right- righter- to the _right_ , you moron, didn’t you learn anything in first grade- there, you’ve got it.”

Tony dry-swallows them, taking one more pill than the box advised, and twists the lid shut before shoving it back. “Movie?”

“Movie,” Pepper agrees, and reaches for the remote again.

Two hours later, they’re still watching it, occasionally bursting out at how unrealistic the blood is, or how the girls can’t run in shoes like that.

They’ve been off the clock for a while, but neither of them says anything.


	2. Chapter 2

Tony wakes up and promptly wants to die, preferably quickly, because he has a headache akin to getting hit by a truck and it’s not _fair_ , he didn’t even drink that much last night.

He groans something that’s half a swear and half a plea and all kinds of unintelligible, and literally rolls out of bed, hitting the floor with a muffled thump.

“I hate everything and everyone,” he declares into the carpet, and it comes out in words that actually make sense, so that’s a plus.

He might fall asleep for a few minutes after that, because when he opens his eyes again there’s sun filtering through the curtains.

He pushes himself up, wiping away the spit that is now caked down his chin, along with dried blood that has flecked off. “What?”

“Get the fuck up,” Darcy yells, and Tony represses the urge to put his hands over his ears, curl up into a tiny ball in the corner of his room, and stay there for the rest of his life. “I don’t care how drunk she got you, you have twelve minutes to get dressed or we’re dragging you out the door in your tightey-whiteys.”

“She didn’t get me drunk,” Tony yells back. “ _You_ got me drunk, you bastards. Pepper is weirdly adamant about me not drinking in her presence. And I don’t own tightey-whiteys.”

There’s a clunking sound, and suddenly Clint is very close to the door. “You sure?”

Tony frowns, pouring over that for a second. “Please, merciful lord in heaven, tell me you didn’t.”

They both start laughing, and Tony has a split second of _why the hell would they change my underwear_ , before he reaches down and discovers that he’s naked, except for-

“What the _hell_ ,” he yells, still not sitting up in case he’s in one of those false senses of security, where the nausea part of the hangover doesn’t hit until he sits up. “Darcy, are these yours?”

“Well, they’re not mine,” Clint says, almost indignantly.

Tony glances down, trying not to move his head too much, and catches a glimpse of purple lace.

“I hate you,” he says, and Darcy just laughs louder.

It takes another three minutes, two aspirin that he took home, and two glasses of water hand-delivered by Clint (who cackles wildly when he sees the bright purple thing that Tony is wearing that he’s is half-sure is a thong, in which case he has no idea why women voluntarily subject themselves to this) until he finally manages to sit up.

He spends a few seconds congratulating himself on the lack of vomit that’s down his front, and then thinks about doing it on Darcy’s thong just to spite her.

He then realizes that he had just seriously considered vomiting on his friend’s underwear, and pulls himself up by his bedpost.

He lurches towards the jeans he had worn yesterday, and has to slump back to the floor to put them on. He wriggles the first leg in, takes a while to curse whoever invented alcohol, and slides his second leg in.

They’re wrinkled, but they were wrinkled yesterday, too, so Tony doesn’t care. They sit low on his hips, and as he buttons and zips them up, he considers texting Bruce to thank him for not letting him get that tramp stamp last year.

“Are you decent,” Darcy says from the door, and doesn’t give him time to answer before pushing it open.

Tony smiles grimly at her as he reaches for a shirt. “You’ve already seen me in your underwear this morning, I don’t think there’s any less decent we can pull off today.”

She smiles, seeing the strip of purple under his jeans. “Yet you haven’t changed out of them.”

“If I tried to change into a different pair,” Tony says, trying to keep his pride and probably failing miserably, “I would fall over and crush my skull on my radio. And it’s laundry day.”

They both know it’s true, but she just steps up and tugs gleefully on the waistband. “Whatever helps you sleep at night. Which happens to be women’s panties. Who knew?”

He gives her a dry look, and slaps her hands away. He pulls his shirt over his head, letting it drop down over his jeans, successfully hiding the thin slice of lace. “See? All better. Now I can go to school and not be ridiculed for wearing a neon purple, lacy thong. Why the hell do you wear these, anyway- and _how_ , Jesus fucking Christ-”

He squirms, and seriously considers just getting to bed and sleeping for the rest of the day.

She shrugs, and snaps the waistband so he yelps. “Feel what they’re doing right now? They’re supposed to do that. I hope. And if anyone sees, you’ll find a way to rock them. You could start a new trend.”

He glares, but he’s hungover and sleep-deprived and he hasn’t had his coffee yet, so it doesn’t turn out like he thought it would.

She lets the grin take over her face, spreading to her eyes, and Tony remembers, for at least the eight time this month, that Darcy is the kind of atrociously beautiful that makes you hate yourself.

“Coffee,” she says, and his mouth ticks reluctantly.

“You read my mind,” he says, trying not to sound too grateful.

She shrugs, and starts towards the door. “We already made some while you were passed out, but we left you a bit at the bottom.”

Tony stumbles faster, and when he gets to the kitchen, Clint cocks an amused eyebrow and holds out the pot of coffee.

There’s only a small scraping of it left, but Tony tips the pot back and swallows as much as he can, going for a spoon when there are only dregs left.

Clint watches him, leaning back on the sink. “Your dependency on that is mildly disturbing.”

Tony gives up on the spoon and starts scooping it with his fingers, sucking every last bit he can out of his skin. “Really? Only mildly?”

Clint opens his mouth, but Darcy tugs on his shoulder as she passes. “Hurry the fuck up, we’re going to be late.”

“Gee, what a bother-”

“Don’t go all British on me, asshole, I’m not getting detention again just because you’re going to throw up if you move.”

Tony feels the coffee start to buzz through him, hitting at the back of his eyes and flooding upwards. He flashes a grin at her, and is semi-confident about it when he says, “I promise not to throw up on the bus.”

“You said that last time,” Darcy says, but opens the door.

 

They take a taxi instead, because Tony’s dad occasionally gives him an influx of spending money due to make up for his fatherly negligence, and they arrive quarter of an hour early, thanks to the taxi driver being a maniac and road-raging his way through the lines of traffic.

It was equally exhilarating, terrifying and life-threatening at the same time, which is how Tony generally likes things.

They wait until there’s no-one passing by to get out, and Clint makes a beeline towards the field, where most of his pack usually hang out.

Darcy and Tony head inside, and with every step, Tony wants to both vomit, and readjust his thong where it’s riding up.

When they lock the door to the handicapped bathroom, Tony digs out the panel in the wall that they found in sophomore year, and takes out the mouthwash.

They’ve kept a large range of things in there over the years, but when Tony checks, there’s the same things that were there last time: lemon-scented deodorant, a flare gun, an almost-empty bottle of vodka, mouthwash, a packet of cigarettes, two spare pens, and a laser pointer.

“And teachers tell us we’re not resourceful,” Darcy says before she swigs her mouthwash, not even spitting it out, just swallowing it.

Tony has seen her do it at least nine times. “You know you’re probably going to get a cancerous ulcer and die in mass amounts of pain, yes?”

“Stop being a pussy and drink your mouthwash.”

He tips it obediently into his mouth, swishes it around for a few seconds, and then bends over the sink and spits.

His mouth now feels like a minty, painful inferno, due to the raw cuts that are still in his mouth, but at least he doesn’t stink of liquor.

Mostly, at least. He’s realized that in the past few months, his clothes have all started to develop a distinct vodka-y undertone.

“Class,” Darcy says, swallowing more mouthwash as an afterthought and wiping her mouth, twisting the lid back on. “If we get there early, we get to eat faster.”

Tony takes the mouthwash from her when she holds it out, and shoves it in the back of the hole in the wall before slotting the plaster back in place. “Home Ec?”

She snorts quietly. “Am I the only fucking one who keeps track of our schedule?”

“Yes,” Tony says honestly, reaching for his bag.

 

 

Everyone loves Home Ec class for two main reasons.

One: the teacher, Ms. Rounder, is perpetually stoned, and only shows up to class for ten minutes to take the roll, give them the recipe, and then sometimes she comes back at the end of class to see how it all turns out.

Then, of course, she eats something out of everything, because she’s practically a walking ‘don’t do pot’ advertisement, who broadcasts all the symptoms, but mainly the munchies.

And two: unless you set something on fire (on purpose) or kill someone (on purpose), you get an automatic B+.

So Tony doesn’t need to have breakfast when he has it first period- not that he’s been having breakfast lately- and instead of baking the cake like they’re supposed to, he sits up on the counter with Darcy and Bruce, and eats the cereal that Ms. Rounder thinks she has hidden in the back of the shelves.

They borrow some milk from the guys who are actually doing the recipe, fill their bowls, grab a spoon and eat, watching as only two groups actually try to do what they were told.

He’s half-paying attention to whatever Darcy is saying and half waiting for the other reason why he loves this class to show up, because Tony has counted, and he hasn’t been late to this class once this year.

Well, he hasn’t _counted_ , he’s just- noticed. Distantly. In a way that he doesn’t care about, at all.

“He had to go back to pick up his homework,” Bruce says, following Tony’s gaze to the door.

Tony feels Darcy’s eyes on him, and pretends to startle. “Sorry, what was that?”

In his experience, no-one has believed it when they were told that Bruce was Clint’s- Beef’s- twin brother. Clint is blonde and lanky and a dick, where Bruce is small and nerdy and mousy-haired and is- well, not a complete asshole, which is what most of the school thinks of Beef.

If Clint isn’t paying attention, or if he isn’t playing ‘Beef,’ he and Bruce have almost identical smiles.

Bruce’s the guy you know is going to be incredibly, unfairly hot one day, if only he’d go through puberty already.

He also happens to be the best friend of the other reason Tony loves this class, so he’s not surprised when Bruce’s smile turns smug. “You’re seriously still doing that?”

“I have absolutely and utterly no idea what you’re talking about,” Tony says. “Crazy person.”

Bruce snorts, and he and Darcy trade looks.

“I was just thinking,” Tony says, chewing, “that it’s supposed to rain soon. So he should get here before it starts with the whole Noah’s Arc bit.”

Every year, there’s a week- or a week-ish- in the beginning of spring where it starts raining and doesn’t stop. Last year it lasted nine days, and Tony spent most of it in Darcy’s house, holed up in her room to keep her siblings out.

Darcy shakes her head, scraping her spoon around her bowl. “You’re so full of shit, I swear to god.”

Tony starts to formulate a witty retort that would render them all starstruck, and it’s half-formed in his mind when the door opens, and he snaps to attention.

And yes, there he is, in all his horrible checkered pants and long-sleeved thermal glory, and he’s being dragged along by the arm by Ms. Rounder, whose eyes are so bloodshot Tony is surprised she can see out of them.

“Last student,” she slurs, and giggles slightly.

Everyone turns to her, and she giggles again, louder. “Last student. In my class. Last one to get here, naughty. Go and- cook. Go cook cake. Cook cake. That’s such a great- great-”

“Alliteration,” Bruce says. “Uh, Miss, do you think you could let Steve go?”

She looks down blearily where her hand is digging into his sleeve, and blinks, like she hadn’t noticed. “Oops. Sorry, student!”

She unclenches her hand from his sleeve and pushes it over her eyes, rubbing it down her face. “Seriously. Everyone go bake cake.”

A few students mumble ‘yes, miss,’ but everyone else just tries not to laugh as she pulls at her cheek.

“Seriously,” she says, and it comes out distorted due to how she’s tugging her cheek outwards. “Go. Bake. But not like me bake, because that’s- bad. Don’t _get_ baked. Just go bake. Good students. Seriously. Bake.”

Tony stares after her as she giggles again, and then turns, limping out the door.

 _What the hell_ , he thinks to himself, _is with me attracting irresponsible adults_?

The door swings closed and everyone looks at each other, communicating the usual ‘how the hell did she even get _hired’_ that none of them bother to voice anymore.

“So,” Bruce says, turning to Tony, “Looks like you were right about the rain.”

Tony starts to ask what the hell he’s talking about before glancing over at Steve again- his hair is crinkled, darker blonde than it usually is, bed-head messy and dripping water down his neck. There are pock-marks of water all the way down his pants, and up his shirt, like he’d been splashed.

He watches as a drop starts slipping down Steve’s jaw, hanging to his chin for a second before breaking off and hitting the tiles.

He drags his gaze up and Steve is frowning at Tony’s- mouth?

“Oh,” he says after a lightheaded second. “Oh, that’s just- a thing. I helped Cli- Beef out with something.”

Steve’s eyebrows draw inwards, and he looks towards Bruce.

Bruce leans back, his hands up. “Don’t look at me, I don’t know anything.”

“I agreed to it,” Tony says hastily, feeling his hangover start to pound heavily, like stones thumping around in the back of his head. “It was a totally mutual- punching thing. Status, you know? It’s fine,” he adds, when Steve’s frown doesn’t let up.

“Why did you agree to get punched in the-” Steve raises a hand and pushes his hair back from where it’s plastered across his forehead. “That’s- _why_?”

“Favour to a friend,” Tony says finally, after a few seconds of struggling for something that didn’t make him sound at least half insane. “Taking one for the team. Or something.”

Steve presses his lips together. “Or he could just stop being Beef.”

“Been there, tried to talk to him about it, failed spectacularly,” Tony says, trying for a smile and ruining it when his teeth brush against a cut and he winces. “You know how it is.”

“That doesn’t mean I’m going to lie down and take it.”

Darcy’s cereal is more or less abandoned by this point. “What the fuck do you mean by-”

“I mean-” Steve’s tongue runs over his bottom lip, a stubborn tick that draws Tony’s eyes every time he sees it. “I’m not _accepting_ it.”

Tony opens his mouth to say _we’re not accepting it, either,_ but his split lip twinges painfully as he tries, and it sort of dies in the back of his throat, because if they aren’t accepting it, why did he tell Clint he could punch him so he could keep up his image?

“You know how it is,” Tony says again, and his throat clicks. “This is just what happens. I guess.”

And there’s the look that Tony has been on the receiving end of too many times- the sad, heavy look that makes his hands itch, that makes him want to look away.

Steve looks like he’s going to say something else, so Tony blurts, “I’m going to go have a smoke. Anyone else coming?”

“It’s raining,” Steve says, gesturing to his wrecked hair, which is still dripping down onto his ears. “You’ll get soaked if you stand out in the field-”

“Then I won’t go to the field, I’ll go to the bathrooms because I’m a villainous genius and don’t get caught doing things like that.”

Again, Steve hovers on the edge of something, but then his shoulders sag, barely enough to be noticeable. “No, thanks.”

Tony nods, maybe too fast, and looks past Bruce, because it’s a widely-known fact that never smokes.

Darcy looks down at her cereal, which is only half-eaten. “I’ll catch up.”

“Great,” Tony says, and pushes himself off the table. “See you.”

He nods at them, and they all nod back- he’s not that close to Steve and Bruce, but they put up with him, at least. Then again, he thinks he should be excused in Steve’s case, because 99% of the time that he’s around, Tony has zero control over his brain-to-mouth filter. Well, at least less control than he usually does, which is more than slightly worrying, because lately he’s had no idea what he’s been saying, ever.

When  he closes the door to the kitchen, he goes over to the wall to drop his head on it a few times, before the hangover comes back with a sudden vengeance and he thinks better of it.

He thinks, _I need to stop drinking on school nights, fucking hell,_ and quickly dismisses it, because this is at least the twenty-sixth time he’s thought it.

He stands there for a while, head against the wall, still not entirely sober. He feels his stomach roll, and he squeezes his eyes shut until it passes.

Finally, he pulls out his phone, and goes into his contacts. He scrolls down, stopping on ‘Ty,’ considering him for a second before remembering how he had basically brushed him after off the last time.

 _I should really have a separate contacts list for the people I make out with,_ he thinks, and almost pauses on ‘Drake,’ before deciding that he definitely needs a girl right now and scrolling down, down, down, until he gets to ‘Christine.’

Christine’s okay. A bit of an asshole, but okay. She ditches about twice as much as Tony does, so she’s always available. That, and she doesn’t overdo it on tongue like most girls he’s made out with.

 

**_From: Tony_ **

**_To: Christine_ **

_Hey you want to go for a smoke in the bathrooms near the labs_

**_From: Christine_ **

**_To: Tony_ **

_Sure c u in five_

 

Another thing he likes about Christine: she gets to the point.

Also the added bonus of being a girl, a bitch and a redhead, so there’s no chance of her reminding him of a certain Steve Rogers, who is one of the most decent guys he knows, has stupidly blue eyes, and has been under his skin for the past six years, stubbornly refusing to budge.


	3. Chapter 3

Tony doesn’t remember how he started smoking- literally, he had needed photographic proof the next day until he actually believed he was dumb and wasted enough to try it- but he kept smoking because he wanted something to do with his hands.

Like now, when he’s leaning on the sink next to Christine and bouncing his hand off of his opposite palm, poising his cigarette between his fingers.

Christine forms her lips into an ‘O’ and blows smoke downwards. “Looks like the rain is coming early this year.”

“Yeah,” Tony says, feeling strangely tired.

It isn’t heavy now- just drizzle that’s getting slightly heavier, but the gutters are spilling over and the ground is drenched, so it’s obviously died down in the past ten minutes.

She looks over at him, and smiles around her cigarette as she sucks it. “You’re hungover again.”

“You’re a ginger again,” he replies. It’s not his best line, but it gets the job done, and they both smile easily at each other.

He likes this, sometimes- being with someone who he doesn’t know at all, who doesn’t know which parts to push to make him fold, to make him crack.

There’s barely any light in here- he has to squint to see her face, her trademark dark pink lipstick that leaves marks every time that they do this, without fail.

“Since there’s only a few months left of school, I’m liable to have a total mental breakdown, right?” Tony purses his lips, sucks hard, and almost spits the smoke out. “I’m practically overdue.”

She raises her eyebrows, which Tony always expects to be plucked, but they never turn out to be. She has the lipliner, the handbag, the clothing, the long, dramatic mascara-lashes, but her eyebrows remain unplucked. Sure, they’re nice eyebrows, but he just thinks there’s something missing in that equation.

She taps ash on the sink, and turns on the tap so it gets caught in the water, spiralling sideways. “You okay?”

He looks towards the mirror, at that one piece of hair that he can never get to lie down. He scrapes at it, pushes it down, but it flicks back up when he takes his hand off. “What, me? I’m fine. I’m dandy. I’m so golly-gosh darn gee willikers A-okay, people should make posters of me and hang them up in cubicles so people don’t get fed up and throw themselves out of a window when they remember they’re working in a _cubicle_.”

“Wow.” She leaves another lipstick mark on her cigarette, her other hand sliding a clip out of her hair. “Say that again with feeling.”

He glances at her, and she’s looking down, scraping the mud off her shoe with the toe of her other one. “I’m fine.”

“You’re always fine.” She doesn’t look up, but he feels her eyes anyway. “I’m fine. Everyone’s fine. We’re all _fine_.”

Now it’s his turn to raise his- again, unplucked- eyebrows, and his cigarette stalls in his hand. “Are you okay?”

Her mouth twists sideways, her lipstick smudging. “It’s- it’s just Pack shit.”

Most schools- or at least the other schools in town that Tony knows of- have cliques. The popular clique, the nerd clique, the basketball players, the subsections and different levels of ‘hot’, etc.

Here, they have _Packs_.

There are the Jockstraps, who spend most of their time in the back court making passes at girls that are tragically out of their league, and tossing a ball around. There are the Guccis, who are about a dozen or so absurdly privileged Juniors who have designer everything.

The Meats are the bulky, multiracial, sneering guys who no-one dates except for the stoners (who are the Pot-Pack, or the ‘Pockets’). Beef happens to be the head Meat, and he was named as such.

Then the cheerleaders, who are the Shlowneck(Short-Skirt-Low-Neckline), in which they didn’t have any say in the matter over, because the name was accidentally dubbed by the Principal in a legendary assembly when he had forgotten the microphone was on. The plural for them is also ‘Shlowneck.’ Like the plural for ‘sheep’ being ‘sheep’ instead of ‘sheeps,’ and that confused the hell out of Tony until he was at least nine.

The Undeclared are many and scattered, and Tony is one of them.

Christine is one of the main girls in the ‘Leathers,’ all of whom wear leather jackets and smoke just about anything, just about anywhere.

She shrugs, and her dress shifts up her knees with it, and takes a long drag from her cigarette, until it’s almost down to the filter. “You know how it is.”

The words clatter, and Tony remembers less than half an hour ago, saying _you know how it is_ through a split lip and hating it even as he had said it.

He nods, ducking his head and bringing his cigarette to his lips. He breathes in, lets it sit in his lungs for a few seconds, and blows it out in a plume of smoke. “Hey, if I ask a personal question, will you beat the crap out of me with your handbag?”

She looks at him, considering. “Depends what it is.”

His mouth twitches at that. “Comforting.”

She smiles, and it’s warmer than the ones he’s seen on her before.

They do this for the buzz- making out, that is. They don’t hang out, they don’t acknowledge each other in the hall, they just text each other and the other one shows up if they feel like it.

Tony has a lot of those people, now that he thinks about it. Afterthoughts- ones whose company he likes, even only in small doses.

Not including the ones he doesn’t like, but he makes a rule not to keep in contact with them unless they’re spectacularly hot or are particularly skilled at their field.

Like, say, handjobs.

Christine tilts her head towards him. “Okay, shoot.”

“Why do you do it?”

Tony already knows, distantly, but he’s never heard someone actually say it. He’s not sure how he’d even word it, if someone asked him.

He’s expecting it when she drops her gaze, when she takes another self-conscious drag on the cigarette. “Why? You go here, you already know.”

“Yeah, but no-one actually talks about it. Everyone just changes the subject, and it’s- god, you _hate_ them! You have maybe one real friend in there, and the rest of you hate each other, and you know you hate each other, and it’s so _stupid_ , and I don’t _get_ it.”

He stops, the smoke suddenly burning at the back of his throat, and he has to put a hand over his mouth until he’s stopped coughing.

She’s still not looking at him when he stops. “You know why.”

“It’s stupid-”

“You can talk. You actually like the guys you hang out with.”

He’s never seen anyone smoke angrily, but she’s managing it. “Sorry, I just- I wanted to hear someone say it out loud.”

A perfectly-painted nail is drumming against the cigarette, and it’s almost burning her fingers at this point. “It’s fine. We all kind of want to hear it, right?”

They both take another swallow of smoke, and they’re both waiting for her to speak until she finally breathes it all out in one big rush. “Come on, Tony, you _know_. It just happened, and none of us are willing to grow some balls and tell them to shove it. It’s- comfortable like this.”

“Comfortable,” Tony repeats, looking at her practiced stance, how she’s holding her shoulders back, how her expression looks tired under all that makeup. “Yeah, everyone seems really comfortable.”

She shrugs, almost helplessly, and Tony notices how small she looks through all those mindless accessories.

She sucks on her cigarette before letting it fall into the sink. “Well, this completely ruined my buzz. How about we both find something else to do with our mouths other than argue politics?”

Because he’s an idiot, Tony realizes he doesn’t really want to make out with a gorgeous girl in a badly-lit bathroom right now.

But he’s still hungover, and it’s not even eleven, and he’s tired and he doesn’t even want a girl right now, he wants those terrible green slacks and that semi-disapproving look and- and whatever he can get from Steve, honestly, because he’s that pathetic and he’s not even _friends_ with him, not really.

He doesn’t want to go back to class, not where Darcy will be looking at him and Bruce will be looking at him and Steve will be concentrating on the cake, because everyone knows he disapproves of Tony’s sluttish tendencies, even if he doesn’t voice it.

He doesn’t want to go back to class, where Darcy won’t say anything but they’ll both know what she’s thinking: _did it help this time? Did it get Steve out of your system, once and for all_?

And Christine is looking up at him expectantly, and all Tony can think of is that Steve is the slightest bit taller than her, less than half an inch, so he’d still have to lean up to kiss Tony.

He watches Christine’s bright red mouth move, and only tunes back in when she snaps her fingers in front of his face.

“Hello,” she says, in a tone that means she’s said it before. “Earth to Tony. Are we doing this, or not?”

For a second, he just looks down at her, and doesn’t know what to do with the disappointment that is gathering somewhere behind his eyes.

Then he reaches over and stubs his cigarette, letting it topple over into the sink. “Be careful of my mouth, okay? It’s still raw.”

“Whatever you say, asshole,” Christine says, and pulls him down.


	4. Chapter 4

After Christine leaves so she can catch the last half hour of class, Tony spends a few minutes afterwards trying to make it look like he didn’t just have a leech viciously attack his neck.

Finally, he decides it’s useless, and decides to just shove his collar open and continue with the latest slut chiche.

‘Slut chiche’ makes him remember that he remembers that he’s still wearing the thong, and that’s probably why Christine had randomly burst out laughing when she had put her hand down his pants.

Well. That makes him considerably less confused. And hugely less offended.

He has to text Darcy to ask what he has now, and the text he gets back is riddled with swearing, followed by, ‘ _Psychology, asshole, and I’m not letting you copy my notes.’_

He sends her a smiley face and starts to head outside before seeing the rain that is now pelting down, splashing up when it hits the concrete.

“Shit,” he says to himself, and has a serious internal debate about whether or not to stay in the bathroom and smoke until break.

He looks back at the bathroom, which at this point looks like it has maybe two square inches of breathable air, and looks back outside to where the rain isn’t letting up.

He considers his folder, but if he held it over his head everything would dissolve in a papery mush after six seconds.

“Shit,” he says again.

A voice in his head that sounds suspiciously like Darcy yells at him to ‘stop pussying around and run’ as he stands in front of the door hating everything, and in that moment he decides that today very definitely sucks in all definitions of suckagge, ever.

He wrenches open the door and starts to sprint, holding his bag close to his chest and swearing loudly as water splashes up over his feet, soaking through his shoes.

He runs blindly through the courtyard, takes a shortcut through the bushes (which he regrets as soon as he goes into them because holy shit, thorns) and by now his shoes make a wet slapping sound whenever they hit the ground.

He bursts into class, and everyone stares as he drips awkwardly onto the carpet.

He gives them a wave, flashes a grin, and manages to fit in blowing a kiss at all of them before the teacher starts to glare.

Darcy is muffling either a groan or laughter with her hand, and he nudges her when he slides into the seat beside her. “You know how you said you wouldn’t let me copy your notes?”

“I’m not letting you.”

“Yeah, but I thought that maybe if I pissed you off enough-”

“Fuck you,” she says, but she’s covering a smile when she pushes her paper over. “And get your own pen.”

Tony makes a face, pulling his mouth down exaggeratedly. “But that takes _effort_ , I have to bend all the way down to my bag and unzip it and-”

She says, “Fuck you,” again, but it’s more of a sigh and she’s still smiling, so Tony takes it in stride.

 

The class drags on as the teacher, Mr. Newman, who is one of the teachers yet to give up on getting his students to learn things, scribbles near-incomprehensible things on the board and everyone allows their brain cells to die a quiet, dignified death.

Darcy is readjusting her shirt, tugging it down so the lace of her bra is peeking out. She makes a rule to always have at least a bit of it above her shirt. Today, it’s bright pink.

She sits like she does everything else: in a way that accentuates her boobs.

Tony is about twenty seconds from his head dropping down to the table and smearing water all over it, when something jabs at his elbow.

He twists in his seat. “Yeah?”

Kelly Gibson, a low-ranking member of the Pot-Pack, motions at his neck. She’s grinning, and Tony watches her dreadlocks fall over her shoulders and wonders how the biblical rain is going to affect them. She’s pretty thin, so he guesses she’d eventually sag under the growing weight of her hair as it gets wetter and therefore heavier, and end up having to either chop it off or drag it everywhere in a wheelbarrow.

He lifts a hand to his neck, and he remembers the bruise before his fingers press against it. He makes himself smirk, bringing a finger to his lips. “Shush. I’ve got a reputation to uphold.”

“Your reputation of being a huge fucking slut,” Darcy says, bent low over her paper.

Tony kicks her under the table, but keeps the smirk as he looks at Kelly. “That, too.”

Kelly giggles the giggle that only an incredibly stoned person can do, low-pitched and loose and lazy, before letting her seat rock back to its original position.

He gives Darcy a look, and she leans over. “You look like a deleted scene from Twilight.”

“I take that as a compliment.”

“You take everything as a compliment. Slut.”

“I’m sorry, is this supposed to be where I clutch my chest and say, ‘oh, you wound me’? Because personally, I consider ‘slut’ a term of endearment.”

“That,” Darcy says, “is a telltale and disturbing sign that you’ve been spending too much time around me.”

Tony leans forwards on his elbows, pushing his hands together and grinning. “Bother. I’ll have to cut back on that, then.”

“Don’t you fucking dare,” Darcy says to her paper, and looks up when Tony bumps her hand.

She looks at it for a second, and when it clicks, she rolls her eyes. She opens her mouth like she’s going to say something like, ‘seriously,’ but instead she snaps it shut and slots their pinkies together, squeezing for a second before letting go.

She goes back to copying off the board, and says, “I have no idea what your thing is about that.”

Honestly, Tony doesn’t, either, but it’s a thing that’s stuck with him from way back when his dad used to smile and actually be present some of the time.

He glances over at her paper, only managing to read half of it because her handwriting is atrocious, and the board isn’t much better.

There’s only ten minutes left to class, anyway, so he officially gives up for the day, never mind there’s still lunch and two classes to go.

 

In last period, he’s half paying attention to the movie and half thinking over the only thing he had absorbed in Psychology, and he honestly doesn’t know if it’s making him worried or depressed.

It keeps running over and over in a reel, not even in Mr. Newman’s voice anymore, just in a weird, disembodied drone that repeats itself until he’s picked it apart letter by letter.

Something important happens on the crappy TV screen- someone explodes or a baby moose gets born or _something_ , he hasn’t been paying enough attention to tell if it’s an action movie or a documentary- and one of the students beside him jolts in his seat.

It’s a small jolt, but it’s enough to rock the table slightly, and Tony suddenly wants an earthquake, a tsunami, a tornado, anything to mess him up and make his brain stop going around in the same circles, to stop making that stupid quote- he thinks it’s a quote, it sounds like something that would get quoted- burn itself out.

 _Everything that we do_ , Mr. Newman had said, _is out of either fear, or seeking pleasure_.

That was all that Tony had gotten out of the entire lesson, and he has no idea how it was relevant to whatever he was supposed to be learning, but he starts thinking about wanting to jump out of the classroom window.

Not _actually_ jumping out of a window, more like- if he jumped out of a window, he’d do it to get something out of it. And if he didn’t do it, he wouldn’t do it because he didn’t want to look like an idiot, or he wouldn’t want to get hurt, or-

And then he starts thinking about drinking, and how he’s almost overridden any doubts he’s had about it, and how he does it because he wants that loose, easy feeling that he gets whenever it starts to hit his head, like nothing matters.

He tries to think of an exception to the rule, to avoiding fear or seeking pleasure, and the guy next to him shifts again, rocking the table.

He buries his head in his arms, the words still clicking into place like incessant, fucking annoying railroad tracks, and gives up again, but he’s not sure what on.

 

Three hours later, it’s still light outside and Tony is grinning for no reason.

“You can’t go in there.”

Tony pauses where his hand is less than an inch away from the door, and glances over his shoulder. “What?”

The guy behind the desk is maybe two years older than him, and looks adorably out of place, with his big ears and automatic pencil sharpener. “You can’t, uh. Go in there. Sorry, are you her son or something?”

Ah, yes. The old ‘you’re both British therefore you must be related’ assumption.

“Sure,” Tony says, because he’s an asshole and- and- no, that’s it, really. His entire psychological profile summed up in one word. He could have saved his dad a fortune on therapy money.

The guy- ‘Billy,’ if he hasn’t stolen some unfortunately-named man’s nametag- nods, and puts his pencil down where he’s been balancing it over his fingers. “I’ll tell her you stopped by?”

Tony stares a bit more at the nametag, wondering what horrible human being would ever, ever name their child ‘Billy.’

“You must’ve taken ages to come out of her vagina,” he says at last, and congratulates himself for not slurring.

Now that he thinks of it, he spends more time than he should congratulating himself on accomplishing simple tasks while drunk.

Then again, it was a long sentence. He’s very proud.

Hopefully-Not-Billy looks both shocked and appalled.

Tony has been getting this reaction a lot lately.

“I- are you drunk?”

Tony breathes out for a long time, considering. “Really, that depends. On my alcohol tolerance. Because if I had, like, an obscenely big alcohol tolerance, I could drink, like. So much. Like, I could just drink for _ever_. Hey, has anyone ever told you your mouth is really preeeeetty-”

“I don’t think you’re allowed in here if you’re drunk,” Hopefully-not-Billy says uncertainly, looking at him with increasing worry.

Tony nods, because he nods a lot after a few beers. Not that he’s drunk. Because he’s not. He’s- slightly inebriated. Barely tipsy, even.

“Are you hitting on me?”

Hopefully-Not-Billy starts to splutter, his hands opening and closing around each other. “I- no? Why d-”

Tony frowns blearily. “Am I hitting on you?”

Hopefully-Not-Billy blushes at that, colour thudding blotchily through his cheeks. He clears his throat, rearranging his pencils on his desk, which makes Tony giggle for some reason. “I’m not sure it counts if you’re this drunk, but yes, I think you’re hitting on me.”

Tony waves a hand at him dismissively, and sways when he pushes himself off the wall to fall into a chair. “Take it as a compliment. You’re hot. Well, you’re okay looking. Your name is a disgrace to the human tongue, and quite frankly, your chin is _appalling_ -”

“Miss Walters,” Hopefully-Not-Billy says into the phone, “your drunk son is out here, he’s soaking wet, and his neck looks like he’s been mauled by a tiger.”

He pauses, his face pinching as Tony hikes up his leg over one of the other chairs. “And if I’m not mistaken, he appears to be wearing women’s underwear.”

Tony looks down, his head swimming with the sudden motion, and yep, there’s an inch of lace jutting out from where his shirt is tugged up by the arm of the chair. “Ooooops.”

The door opens, and he twists to look at it, which is harder than he originally anticipates, because he’s currently tangled in two chairs and his own limbs.

He struggles for a second, and finally settles with waving his elbow, which is sticking out from somewhere under his torso.

Pepper has the kind of straight face that Tony knows means she’s trying not to burst out laughing, and behind her, there’s a very confused forty-something balding man.

Pepper looks towards Hopefully-Not-Billy, and sighs. “I apologize for my son’s depraved behaviour, Billy. I assure you I’ll be having a very firm chat to him when I’m finished with my client.”

“About my drinking,” Tony says. “And my sluttish tendencies. Oh, and PEPPER. I didn’t make out with Hopefully-Not-Billy. Are you proud?”

“I,” Pepper says, her glasses straight, her hair fixed, her clothing in place, “am ashamed to be called your mother. Make yourself decent while I finish up.”

He raises a hand to salute her, gets muddled up on the way, and ends up just flicking her a wave as the door clicks shut behind her. “Have fuuuuun.”

He’s not sure how long it takes when the door opens again, mostly because there are other things that are more _interesting_ , like Billy’s automatic pencil-sharpener that whirs loudly when you push a pencil into it.

Billy’s eye twitches throughout most of this, but he continues to supply the pencils that Tony pushes gleefully into the sharpener, his eyes tracking the steel as it rotates.

“This,” he declares, “is fucking spectacular.”

Billy doesn’t say anything for a while until after Tony’s ninth pencil, when he sits up and says, “Are you high?”

Tony raises his eyebrows, and is about to answer that no, he’s not, and that as a rule he doesn’t anymore because it usually results in grievous bodily damage, when the door opens.

He spins around, quickly regrets it, and grabs the desk to steady himself.

Then Pepper is at his elbow, sliding a hand around his shoulders so he doesn’t fall over and slice his head open on the doorjam. “Son,” she says, and it sounds stern except for the fact that she’s so obviously taking the piss that he doesn’t know how she’s not kneeling over laughing, “I think we need to have a talk.”

Tony whines in the back of his throat, wanting to say ‘ _but muuuuum_ ,’ or something to that extent, but he finds that he’s laughing too hard to do it.

The forty-something balding man is looking at him, concerned, but Pepper gives him a smile that she uses to deal with clients, one that Tony never really got. “Sorry you had to see this, sir. Kids nowadays, huh?”

“Uh,” the man says. “Yeah.”

“You have brilliant shoes,” Tony manages, and folds into himself as he starts laughing again.

He’s vaguely aware of being dragged, of making his feet move clumsily, and then of the door shutting behind him. Then he’s being dropped onto the couch, the one that he hasn’t been on in three years that he’s grown to both love and hate at the same time.

“Couch,” he chokes, sliding his hands down the cushions and then down his knees and then back to the couch again. He tips sideways, landing on the arm of the couch and rubbing his face against it, because he’s _missed_ this couch.

He feels the cushion dip beside him, and then Pepper’s hand is nudging absently at his knee as she lifts both her feet up onto the couch. “You always did have a thing for making an entrance. Even if it’s one where you stumble into my office blind drunk and sexually harass my assistant. Why the hell did you tell him you were my son?”

“Didn’t,” Tony says, lifting his head. “He did. Said it, I mean. He asked if you were my mum and I said yes.”

For a moment, Pepper is still. Then she pulls her knees up even higher, and presses them under her chin. “That bastard. How old does he think I _am_? And he thought he was getting a raise, fucking Christ.”

“You’re the best adult,” Tony mumbles into the cushions. “Not just the best one I know, even. The best adult in general.”

“Can’t argue with that,” Pepper says, and her voice makes him think she’s smiling

The silence that follows is warm, and Pepper reaches up to pull her hairtie out. She shakes her hair over her shoulders, and pushes it behind her ears.

It’s comforting, how familiar that movement is- Pepper always seems to relax more when Tony is around, more than she does in this tiny, closed-in office.

And it _is_ closed in, even though there’s a window spanning out for the length of an entire wall. Even with Pepper’s laugh, even with Tony’s loud remarks, it’s always been a private, quiet room. It’s always been grey and bland and _proper_ , and Tony still isn’t sure who hates it the most out of the both of them.

 _This should probably be weird_ , Tony had admitted once.

 _It should be_ , Pepper had agreed, and they hadn’t said anything else for the rest of the movie.

“So,” Pepper says, and Tony takes a few seconds before he can pull himself out of the drunken haze of his thoughts. “Did something happen to provoke this, or did you just feel especially self-destructive today?”

“’M fine,” Tony says, and it comes out tasting of mothballs because of the cushion. “Shut up and let me be drunk and monosyllabic for five minutes.”

He hears her snort softly. “You do realize I’m a therapist, right? I didn’t print those credentials off of Google, no matter what you think. That, and anyone with eyes can tell you’re currently wallowing in your own drunken little cage of self-pity and teenage angst. Even if they were blind. Even if they had their eyes viciously gauged out by blunt spoons used by angst-ridden, self-pitying teenagers-”

He looks up at her with narrowed eyes. “If you start doing the ‘when I was your age’ thing, I swear to our ever-vengeful and horny god-”

He’s expecting the quick prod to the shoulder, and silently thanks her for knowing not to slap him in the head when he’s this close to vomiting. “I’m not _that_ old.”

“You’re totally that old. You’re two seconds from dissolving into bones. You’re like that witch from the thing.”

“Wizard of Oz, and she melted. Or something. I only watched the re-enactment via my ridiculously adorable nieces. Who are actually making better life choices than me at the moment.”

She rearranges her feet, propping them up on Tony’s hip. “Is it whatshisface?”

“Steve,” Tony corrects her, and then internally slaps himself. “And no. I’m just being an idiot. Let me have my drunken teenage angst, okay?”

“And self-pity.”

“And self pity,” he says, pushing his face deeper into the cushion.

She’s quiet for a few seconds, then: “It’s just that you’ve been occasionally phoning me at one in the morning, utterly wasted, and babbling for half an hour about how perfect he is, for the past two years or so.”

She pauses, and Tony hears a rustle as she pushes herself up further. “And about his tragic taste in clothing.”

“It’s _horrible_ , okay?” Tony scrunches up his face and pushes down so the rough material of the cushions drags against his nose.

He frowns into it, feels stupidly sad and uncoordinated and still not drunk enough even though the room is lilting sideways if he cranes his neck.

“I’m just suggesting,” Pepper says, and leans sideways so she’s up against the opposite arm of the couch. “that maybe if you confront th-”

Tony groans loudly, flopping his head sideways.

“-or I could never use that word again,” Pepper finishes, patting him awkwardly with her foot.

She continues to pat him for a few seconds, before using her toes to push up his shirt. “Now, the thong, I’m confused about.”

This time, it’s not so much a groan than it is a wail of eternal pain and frustration, and he thumps a fist uselessly against the couch.

“Or I could stop bringing up anything even remotely involving your life,” Pepper says, and uses her heel to pull his shirt back down to an appropriate length that doesn’t flash the thong. “Denial. Four out of five shrinks recommend it.”

Tony laughs, and his throat sounds like it’s been clogged with water.

He fumbles with her hand, batting at it with his pinkie sticking out, until she finally gets the message and curls her pinkie around his, letting them sit uncomfortably on his hip.

This is where anyone else in her position would say something like ‘you’re a good kid,’ or ‘don’t be too hard on yourself,’ but Pepper stays silent and sits with him on the shitty couch and Tony loves her for it.

She lifts a hand and picks gently at one of his socks; the only clothes he has that are still soaking wet instead of reasonably damp.

“The rain’s started,” she says, and Tony turns his head enough to look out the window where mist is gathering on the glass.

He almost says, _yeah, it’s been like that for a while now_ , before deciding he’s drunk and irrationally pissed off and tired for no reason, so he slumps further into the couch and says, “Yeah.”


	5. Chapter 5

By the time Darcy takes her headphones out and realizes her phone is ringing, it's on its third cycle of the ringtone. She lunges for it, almost tripping over her bag in the process.

She pulls the charger out, and presses the phone to her ear. "Hello?"

"Tony is half-conscious on the floor of my office and I have another client in ten minutes," a voice says, and it takes a second for it to click.

"...Pepper?"

There's a sigh on the other end. "Wonderful deduction. Pretty please come and pick him up before he vomits on my carpet. You can drive, right?"

Darcy pauses. She presses her lips together, considering. "You mean legally, or-"

"Just this once," Pepper says, "I'm going to condone illegal driving. Do not get pulled over, I don't have bail money."

Darcy looks down at her clothes- she's half dressed, having gotten distracted by her new CD when she was putting on her pyjamas. She reaches for her shirt with one hand as she says, "I'll be there in fifteen."

"I have a client in ten minutes-"

Darcy tries to yank her shirt over her head one-handed, but it's slow going. How old is this woman, anyway? "Then stall. You're supposed to be the mature one, remember?"

"Who the hell," Pepper says in a clipped voice, "ever told you that? What, do you think you turn twenty-one and magically get your shit together? Get your head out of your ass and steal your parent's keys."

She's still in a downhill battle with her shirt, and is probably making undignified noises into the phone. "If I get grounded, I'm taking you down with me. Also, how the fuck did you get my number?"

"I went through his phone."

Darcy doesn't snort, but it's a close thing. "Shit. Of course you did. I'm actually starting to get some respect for you."

"That's a horrible idea and I'm judging you for it," Pepper says. "Break every speed limit you can without getting caught. I wasn't fooling around about not having bail money."

The dial tone clicks on, and Darcy abandons the phone and uses both hands to shove her shirt down.

She glances at the clock- her mom isn't home yet, but her dad is down the hall trying to get Bobby to eat his fucking peas, without success.

She can hear his muffled swearing, and starts down the hall, towards the kitchen. It takes a few seconds of shuffling around in her dad's bag until she finds the keys.

 _Thank fucking god for man-purses_ , she thinks.

"What'cha doing, Jugs?"

Darcy startles, but when she turns around, Jane is staring up at her with her thumb in her mouth.

"You're way too old to suck your thumb," Darcy tells her, and Jane frowns.

"I can do what the fuck ever I want."

Darcy blinks. "Great. You're calling me Jugs and inheriting the Darcy gene. Mom's going to love that."

"What'cha doing," Jane asks again, her thumb coming out of her mouth with a 'pop' to poke at Darcy's shoulder.

Darcy shrugs her off. "Nothing. Fuck off."

"You fuck off, Jugs," Jane says, and chins herself on the counter.

One day, Darcy is going to develop a conscience and regret swearing constantly in front of someone who isn’t even in middle school yet.

She pockets the keys, and tries to ignore how Jane's eyes follow them. "Why are you calling me that?"

Jane brightens, her hair bouncing when she looks up. "Jugs?"

"Yeah."

Jane shrugs, and her curls bounce again. "Everyone calls you that."

"No," Darcy says, feeling more uneasy than she should, "people at school call me that. It's not a home thing."

"Why not?"

Darcy looks down at her little sister: all long cheekbones and dark curls that all the women in their family have, all big brown eyes and pink lips, and hopes to hell that she gets home schooled. "It's- fuck, I don't know, it's a Pack thing. A school thing, and- you know how you and Thor hold hands at school, but not when you guys come over here?"

Jane sits back slightly. There's a small dent in her forehead. "Yeah. Why?"

"It's like that," Darcy tries, and doesn't know how else to say it- it's a status thing, it's something that she perpetuates by walking with her chest stuck out, by wearing tight shirts with low necklines and bending over once too often, because Clint uses his alter-ego via fists, and she uses hers via her considerable cleavage.

Jane is young enough to half-understand it: how girls like boys, or are supposed to, at least, and how you're supposed to get a boyfriend and walk around with him and hold his hand, because that's what grown-ups do.

So they do, and they do it in sight of everyone else, but when they're alone, they don't really see the point.

Darcy clears her throat, the keys feeling heavier than usual. "Do you even know what 'Jugs' means, Jane?"

Jane frowns again, deeper, because she hates it when people think she doesn't know something. Darcy was the same.

"Duh. They're the things you pour the stuff out of. We have jugs of milk in the fridge, dummy."

Darcy smiles without meaning to, and leans down. She presses a kiss to Jane's forehead, ignoring her squawks of protest, because she hates to be coddled. Again, Darcy was the same. Still is, sort of.

Darcy leans back, and kisses her again, quickly, on the dent in her forehead. "I really, really fucking hope you don't turn out like me."

Jane looks up at her, confused and angry and looking exactly like Darcy did when she was six, and says, "Why not?"

Darcy shrugs, and Jane shrugs after her, and she looks so much like her that it aches a bit, down at the back of her ribs.

"Gotta go," she says, and kisses Jane again, and this time, Jane leans into it.

She makes it out the door with the keys burning a hole in her skirt pocket, and when they click in the lock, she feels exactly like she did when she was fourteen and cutting through the park at night to meet Tony at their first party.

 _Wind-shield wipers_ , she reminds herself, and switches them on.

It’s probably a monumentally bad idea- technically, she can drive, but she hasn’t had much practice and she’s only been out on the open road on the few times. That, and it’s pissing down with rain, which isn’t helping.

She thinks about turning on the radio, before deciding that it’d probably be asking the universe to get a pickup truck to crash into her while she isn’t paying attention.

She’s only been to Pepper’s office once, and it when she, Bruce and Tony had all been wasted off their faces, but she has to go past the road where it is every morning to get to school, so until then, it’s a cakewalk.

When she thinks she has the right place, there’s a few seconds while she squints through the rain and tries to remember what the fuck else she had done that night, because she seems to remember something involving the dog-shaped bush outside the building and lying down under it.

Then the awkward fumbling of parallel parking, which she still sucks at, and no amount of yelling on either of her parent’s part is going to make her improve.

She almost forgets to put on the handbreak, but remembers it at the last second.

She grabs her dad’s umbrella and pushes it open as she gets out of the car, closing the car door behind her and almost getting her skirt caught in it as she does.

There’s water pooling everywhere, and by the time she gets to the door, there’s mud caked to the bottom of her shoes, and she leaves streaks of it on the mat when she wipes them.

There’s a woman and what looks like her teenaged son in the lobby, and Darcy nods awkwardly at the mom as she makes for the door.

The first thing she sees when she opens the door is Tony’s head, which is angled into his armpit.

“Well. Fuck.”

“Indeed,” Pepper says from behind her desk. “Is there a super secret technique for waking him up, or do we have to carry him out the window?”

“Why the window?”

Pepper sighs. “My clients are in the lobby, blockhead. So that’s a no on waking him up?”

“Look, I get that you’re, like, a decade older than me and that you can probably sue me, or something, but I’m not carrying him out the fucking _window_. It’s _raining_.”

Pepper stands, pushing her hair back behind her ears. “Eleven-ish years older than you, actually, and I could possibly be persuaded to carry him through the lobby. I’m just worried that my clients will be put off by the drunk, underage bloke that we’re going to be carrying out of my office. And then they’ll report me for carrying said underage, drunk bloke out of my office.”

Darcy watches as Tony groans something into the couch cushions, and mashes his head further down. “Why the fuck did he come here, anyway?”

“Don’t ask me, I’m just his therapist.” At Darcy’s unimpressed look, she shrugs. “Referring back to my years of genius expertise and various degrees, I’d say he was lonely. Or he was just stupidly drunk and needed another British person to speak British with. I mean, I _could_ go into further depths about his blindingly obvious abandonment issues, or hi-”

“’British’ isn’t a language,” Darcy interrupts her, with a sudden burning urge to remain oblivious to Tony’s blindingly obvious abandonment issues and anything related to them.

There’s something about Pepper that unnerves her, and most of it is probably because she’s a shrink, but Pepper always looks at her like she _knows_ her. Like she notices how Darcy’s nails are bitten, how she never wears eyeliner, how her outfit always revolves around making her breasts look big, or bigger- like she sees it, and sees through it, like she sees through ‘Jugs’ and into ‘Darcy’ and doesn’t know what to make of what she sees.

Once, when Darcy had been drunk and giggling and lolling her head on Bruce’s shoulder, Pepper had said, _why do you swear so much_?

Darcy had only started drinking that night because her house had been too loud and Tony’s house had been too quiet, and Bruce had been an easy substitute for both. She had dragged him along, dragged Tony along, and Tony had said, _hey, you guys should meet Pepper, she’s_ -

And Pepper had asked, and Darcy had said, without thinking, _people don’t expect me to swear_.

Because she lets her peers call her ‘Jugs,’ she lets them stare and lets them objectify her. She lets them wink and do whatever they want to her in the backs of their minds. She smiles along, but only to a point.

She’ll do what she’s supposed to, what she’s expected to, but she can have this. She can shove ‘fuck’ and ‘shit’ into a conversation that doesn’t need it, and everyone does it, and it’s not something huge, not by a long shot, and all it’ll do at most is make people’s eyebrows go up- it’s this small, stupid, quiet thing that barely matters, but it’s hers.

She thinks something must show in her face, because Pepper drops her gaze, looking down at Tony. “You, uh. You take his head, I’ll get his legs.”

Darcy shifts closer, trying to find a way to comfortably angle her arms under his armpits without dropping him.

She pushes his head to the side, and hooks his arms under his armpits. Her breath comes out of her in a rush as she lifts Tony, because he’s heavier than he looks.

“Fuck,” she says, half to herself, and pretends not to notice how Pepper looks at her.


	6. Chapter 6

The bruises are going yellow at the edges now- mottled and splotchy and decidedly unattractive in every way humanly possible.

 _I need to stop drinking on school nights,_ Tony thinks to himself as he glares dutifully at the multi-coloured, swollen mess that is his jaw.

He knows how this goes by now- for him, at least. It peaks after a few days, and then starts to fade. But until then, he’s left with a slowly-healing split lip, and a fucked up jaw that is going to look like hell for the next day or so that makes him regret letting Clint beat the shit out of him.

He isn’t really bothered by the hickey- people are used to it, and again, he pulls his collar down to give easy access to anyone who wants to ogle. He continues to glare at his reflection until his phone starts to vibrate, and he scrabbles to catch it as it shudders itself off the tap and clatters into the sink.

He grabs it and rubs a thumb over the drops of water that are smeared across the screen, and knows who it is before he even clicks.

 

**_From: Clint._ **

**_To: Tony._ **

_Am outside hurry up_

 

He bends, picks up his bag, pushing one strap over his shoulder as he makes for the door, and spares a longing glance at the coffee machine when he looks into the kitchen.

He opens the door, and it’s not raining hard, per se, but it’s windy, which makes it at least three times worse than regular rain, because it stings like hell and renders umbrellas useless. In the driveway, there’s the familiar shitty truck, which has one windshield wiper off the back window because Clint’s parents never bothered to get it replaced.

And there’s Clint behind the steering wheel, who is the only one out of any of them who can drive (legally, anyway), and he’s gesturing wildly at Tony to get in the car.

There are a few seconds where Tony squints out at the rain and hopes whoever thought up the word ‘hangover’ got a blunt knife shoved deeply into his spleen at some point in his life, and then he shoves one arm over his head and makes a run for it.

When he drags the car door shut behind him, he shakes his head, dog-like, flecking water over the windshield.

Clint yelps, loud. “Dude, stop it, you’re going to get it everywhere-”

Tony starts to slur something along the lines of, “You should be honoured I even got in the car, you ungrateful ingrate,” but he stops when he sees Clint’s face. Or, rather, what’s on it.

For a second, neither of them say anything, and Clint steels his jaw like he always does, like he’s daring him to say it.

The bruise is smeared downwards across his right eye, cutting across his cheekbone. It’s a deep, dark purple, slimming to pink on one side. It’s almost identical to the colour of Tony’s curtains in his bedroom, and it’s half-swollen shut.

It must have happened last night, because Clint’s bruises always take a while to kick in.

Tony swallows the ‘are you okay’ and instead says, with a smile that hurts more than it should, and not just because of the split lip: “Hey, we match.”

And Clint’s shoulders don’t loosen, his face doesn’t relax from that pinched expression, but he looks half-gratefully at him as he twists the key in the ignition.

Tony struggles for common ground, a safe footing that won’t make Clint’s walls slam up, or get him yelled at. His smile this time is well and truly pathetic, and he knows that Clint sees right through it. “Coffee?”

He’s too drunk to deal with this, anyway.

Clint looks at him again, too tired for seven in the morning and too goddamn _old_ for sixteen. “Sure.”

 

Over the years, he’s seen Clint get black eyes more times than he can count. He’d just show up to school with them, claiming after-school brawls with an angry classmate, or a policeman catching him shoplifting and getting violent.

The first time, Darcy had been the first one to realize he was lying through his teeth. But Clint had shrugged it off, insisting heavily on his cover stories when anyone asked out it, and for a while, they had let it slide.

It hadn’t even happened often. Once every few months, he’d show up late sporting a busted lip or the impression of three or four knuckles in his cheek, and every time, Clint would be unreasonably quiet until it healed.

Not in the open, of course. He’d still laugh it off and jeer at everyone in the halls, still sidestep any actual bullying and smoke behind the toilets and let his alter-ego overrun him, but when he was driving Tony and Darcy to the movies and he dissolved back into Clint, he wouldn’t say more than three words to either of them.

Once, Tony cornered Bruce about it, catching him at his locker after Chemistry and sliding an arm across his shoulders.

Bruce had been normal at first- that polite, slightly nervous smile, because they hadn’t known each other that well yet; letting Tony drag him around the corner without complaint.

As soon as Tony had asked about the five finger-shaped marks on Clint’s neck, Bruce had clammed up immediately and said, half-stiff, half-panicked: “it was some guy at a bar.”

Glossing over the fact that none of them were old enough- or even looked old enough- to get into a bar, Tony had said, “okay.”

Bruce had started to say something about getting to class, about being late, about homework or whatever the hell he could get away with, and Tony had cut him off with, “are you sure it was just some guy at a bar?”

Tony has never been good at reading people. Honestly, he probably could be, if he tried, but he’s never wanted to be able to be good at it- there are some people whose heads he doesn’t want to get into; ugly places he’s never wanted to go.

But even he could tell that Bruce knew it wasn’t true when he had said, ‘yes,’ through his teeth.

Then halfway through last year, Bruce had walked into Chemistry half an hour late (which was unusual in itself) with a long, sloping split near his eye, like he had gotten something thrown at him.

Tony had watched him sit down next to Steve, and he had looked looking painfully aware of how everyone had been staring at him.

From what Tony had seen, Bruce hadn’t said anything for the rest of the lesson, even when Steve had leaned over and whispered something.

No-one messes with Bruce. It’s common knowledge- you don’t fuck with Beef’s brother, no matter how geeky he is, no matter if he refuses to do your homework and hasn’t had his growth spurt yet, no matter if he sucks at gym and wears baggy clothes and is too smart for his own good.

So almost everyone had believed that he had tripped and fell, face first, into the stairs, because there’s no-one dumb enough to beat the shit out of someone who a brother like Bruce does.

Later that day, Steve had come up to Tony in the cafeteria, where he had been eating lunch with Darcy.

“Did you speak to him?”

Darcy had said, “What, Bruce? You’re the one wh-”

“Clint,” Steve had corrected, and then had glanced up, because he had said it louder than he should’ve and people notice those kinds of things if you’re talking about someone with a reputation like Beef. “He looks fine, but he’s- I tried to talk about it to him earlier, in the bathrooms, but he told me to screw off.”

“He was probably playing Beef.”

“There was no-one around.”

“He has to stay in character when-”

“Come _on_ ,” Steve had said, in the tone of voice that people use when they want to shout, but can’t. “We all know Bruce didn’t trip. And Clint avoids fighting until there’s almost literally no other option.”

Steve had swallowed, and for once, Tony hadn’t stared at the slow drag of his throat. “What are his parents like?”

Darcy had shot a look at Tony, and had opened her mouth before Tony had cut in with, “I don’t think they’re around much.” The shrug had felt heavier than it should have been. “Y’know, work and shit.”

“But how do they- how do they treat them?”

Tony had opened his mouth, and suddenly had no idea what the hell to say.

He had only met them twice- their dad once, their mom once, and at separate times. Their mom had been rushing to grab her keys, her nurse scrubs bunched at the elbows, and her hair had been yanked back in a vicious ponytail.

“I’m Kadee. No drugs, no alcohol, and don’t light the house on fire,” she had told Tony, and her lipstick had been smudged as she made for the door.

Their dad hadn’t been so much of a meeting as a glimpse- a muffled yell from the other side of the wall, and a slice of a rumpled office suit coming in when Tony had been leaving.

Basically, both of them had ended with a door slamming, and Tony thinks it’s their home life in a nutshell.

They never manage to actually talk about it- half because they’re all teenagers with badly-disguised emotional problems that suck at communicating and half because both Clint and Bruce walk out on any conversation starts to head towards their parents, or the bruises.

They still push, but the only thing it ever leads to is Clint getting pissed off, Bruce making a quick exit, and both of them shutting down and getting out of the room.

Tony doesn’t like it, but all in all, it’s easier to shut up about it.

 

When they pull up beside the coffee place, the wind has died down a bit, but the rain has gotten heavier.

When Tony realizes that Clint is looking at him expectantly, he blanches. “I already had to walk out to get to the car; I’m not walking all the way into the shop.”

“How do you think I got to the car, huh? Used my super-special teleportation powers?” Clint sounds less defensive now, but Tony knows they’re both walking on eggshells.

But Tony is careless by nature, no matter what he tries- he’s loud and he’s obnoxious and he tries to keep it like that, no matter what the occasion, because being ‘sympathetic’ or ‘understanding’ will probably get him punched if he tries it. “I thought we agreed to not talk about that. This car could be bugged to find out your super special secret identity, teleportation-man, and as your sidekick, I-”

“Darcy would be my sidekick,” Clint interrupts him, and his mouth is pulling upwards. “We’re the ones with the alter-egos, remember?”

“Beef and Jugs? Seriously? Your superhero duo would be _pitiful_ , I’m-”

“Shut up,” Clint says, but he’s still smiling, which is what Tony was aiming for. “You just don’t want to go in because Steve puts in extra hours in the mornings.”

Tony stares at him, momentarily caught off guard for the second time this morning. “That is- that’s preposterous, offensive and untrue, and I-”

“-didn’t know that I knew that,” Clint says, pushing the car door open. “I also know that you’re going to spend this whole time trying to see him from here, which is impossible, by the way.”

It’s not, and Tony knows it, because if Steve stands at a certain angle next to the cash register, he can get a very good view of his face, and he always ties his apron in a double-knot around his neck.

Clint says, one hand still on the handle, “As much caffeine as you’re legally allowed, right?”

Because he’s an asshole, Tony overdoes the sigh. “You know me _so_ well, Clint.”

Clint doesn’t laugh. Instead, he leans in slightly. “Are you drunk?”

“No,” Tony says, and hey, he’s never been good at lying, anyway.

Clint looks- well, not _disappointed_ , but not happy about it, either. “Dude, it’s not even eight. The sun’s barely up.”

“I’m not _drunk_ ,” Tony says. “Or, I sort of am, but that’s totally not my fault. I’m still drunk from being drunk last night. Completely incidental.”

Tony isn’t sure he’s making sense, but Clint nods. “Uh. Okay. Hence the coffee.”

“Hence,” Tony agrees, and Clint gives him another look, eyebrows raised, before closing the car door.

Tony leans back in his seat, pressing his hair into the headrest and rubbing it against it slightly, messing it up. It’s sort of a perpetual thing- his hair is always messy, no matter what he does, and after a while, he had decided to roll with it.

It’s sort of his motto with most things- hickeys, his reputation, his sort-of-not-really friends, his sort-of-not-really therapist, etc.

He doesn’t know what he’s doing, but he uses big words and flashes everyone a grin and goes with it.

He fiddles with the heater, then the radio, then turns them both off completely. He briefly considers taking out his homework, but it’s at the bottom of his bag and probably wet and he doesn’t know two thirds of the material, anyway.

He opens the door for Clint when he sees him jogging up and trying to shield the coffee with his free hand.

Clint jerks the door shut behind him as he gets in, passing the two cups of coffee to Tony as he starts the engine again.

Tony moves in for a sip of one of them, but Clint grabs it out of his hand before he can. “Yours is the other one. Mine is the sane one which won’t leave me bouncing off the walls and then wanting to kill myself during fourth period.”

“It’s worth it.” Tony swallows a mouthful, and lets his eyes drop shut as he feels the buzz start to spread through him. It’s not as good as it usually is, but it’s still coffee. And at this point in the morning, he’d eat raw coffee beans. “Oh, god. This is the best coffee in all of existence. Or at least in the top three.”

“Triple-shot,” Clint says, prompting it with a sip of his own, which is probably 90% milk, because no matter what he says, he hates black coffee with every square inch of his very being. “Didn’t even have to ask. Congratulations, you not only have a reputation for being a notorious slut, but also for being a coffee fiend.”

Tony can’t help the grin- Clint’s never this animated, especially not after turning up with a new bruise. “I’m so proud right now. This is the crowning moment of my life. I’m actually having a moment right now, give me a second.”

He sniffs, over-exaggerated, and raises his hand to wipe at his eyes.

Clint shoves him, too lightly, too fondly, and Tony has no fucking idea what he did to get him like this, but he’s not complaining.

“You’re a fucking idiot,” Clint says, grinning, and Tony realizes that he hasn’t seen him like this for at least a month, not with that loose smile that doesn’t tighten around the edges.

“I am,” Tony says, suddenly over-sensitive to what he’s saying, what he’s doing, how he can get Clint to stay like this, how he can keep that look in his eyes.

He opens his mouth to say something like, ‘we should get to school,’ and stops himself just in time, because they really should get to school.

They should get go to school, and Clint will bulk out his shoulders and fill out that jacket and make one side of his mouth tug upwards, even when he doesn’t want it to. They’ll laugh and shove people and not look at each other, because it’s high school and this is just how it is.

And then he’s thinking of Psychology class, of tilting his chair back and tipping his head back and sliding his hands back and Mr. Newman saying, ‘everything we do is out of fear and seeking pleasure,’ but not in Mr. Newman’s voice.

He thinks of walking down the hall and not meeting Clint’s eyes, because they’re both playing their parts like they’re used to, and tries to pinpoint whether it’s out of fear or seeking pleasure.

So he’s still holding the coffee, and he still has his mouth open, and the only thing coming out of it is air, and he wants to say something that will fix this, but he doesn’t know what.

And he’s hyper-aware of how bad the next sentence will taste, but it tumbles out before he can swallow it back with the coffee.

“Why do you even hang out with them? You hate it.”

Clint’s smile caves in on itself, and Tony watches it and thinks of landslides.

He says, “I’m sorry,” which tastes even worse than the last sentence, like raw coffee grinds, but bitterer.

He says, “I’m going to shut up now, let’s just pretend that didn’t ha-”

“I can hang out with whoever the fuck I want,” Clint spits, and his knuckles are white around the cup.

“Sorry,” Tony says again. “I really don’t know why I said that, can we not-”

“Fuck you,” Clint says, but it’s shaking around the last letter. “ _Fuck_ you, Tony, I don’t need to- I don’t need-”

His hands are shaking now, along with his voice; cracking at the edges.

“I know,” Tony says, and he really, really doesn’t. “I know, I’m sorry, I just- sorry, Clint, I didn’t mean it like that.”

Clint’s throat clicks, but he’s not looking at him anymore. “You meant it exactly like that.”

“It’s fine,” Tony says, and remembers cigarette ash hitting the sink: you’re fine, I’m fine, we’re all _fine_. “We don’t need to talk about it. We can crawl into our individual pits of denial like every other day, yeah?”

He means it as a joke; accompanies it with a weak smile that isn’t fooling anyone, but Clint still isn’t looking at him. Instead, he’s looking down at his feet, where the pedals are.

“Clint,” Tony says, and reaches for him.

Warning alarms go off before his hand even touches his shoulder, but by then it’s too late and he’s pulling away and Clint is whipping around to him, his face contorted, the lid of his coffee coming off and jolting coffee over his lap.

“ _Fuck_ you, Tony, I can-”

“Hey, I’m trying to help, don’t go Beef on me,” Tony snaps shakily before he can shut himself up, before he can bite down on his tongue, and is expecting it in the worst way when Clint jerks like he’s been slapped.

He shrinks back minutely and the jacket bags around his elbows, until he looks like he’s drowning in it.

“Sorry,” Tony says again, and it grates on his teeth. “I- you know how I say stupid shit, right? Just your run-of-the mill Tony babble bullshit, it’s not-”

It’s then that he notices the coffee that’s staining most of Clint’s front and down his pants, but Clint doesn’t seem to notice it.

Tony says, “Sor-”

“It’s fine,” Clint says, low and soft and tired, so fucking _tired_ , too tired for a Junior with his life ahead of him.

For a second, Tony wonders if Clint’s parents worry about him.

His hands rearranging themselves clumsily on his cup as he nods towards the coffee dripping down Clint’s shirt. “Can I help?”

Clint looks up, and Tony knows that he’ll make the bruise work later- he’ll make it look tough, make it look like he fought for it- but now, it just makes him look impossibly younger.

“No,” Clint says, tired and broken and scarily matter-of-fact, and Tony doesn’t know if he’s even realized about the coffee or not.


	7. Chapter 7

For nine months now, Steve Rogers has had to sprint to get to first period.

He doesn’t even get much money from the extra hour and a half he puts into in the mornings, and it means he has to wake up at 5, but they were understaffed and he’s still saving for college and the owners let him borrow one of their cars to get to school on time, so he keeps coming in every morning, scrubbing the sleep out of his eyes as he goes.

And it’s a small-ish shop in a small-ish town, so there’s barely any traffic in the shop until at least seven.

But today his alarm doesn’t go off, so he doesn’t wake up until his mom knocks on the door and asks him why he isn’t using the shower.

While hurriedly getting dressed, he hits his head on the drawer when he bends down for his jeans, and then again on the window when he goes to open the curtains.

His mom forces a dry piece of toast into his hand and kisses his forehead. She tells him to have a nice day as he half-runs out the door and then doubles back for the house keys. They’re on the kitchen counter, and he fumbles them into his pocket.

“Have a nice day,” she yells after him for the second time this morning, and Steve yells, “You too,” as he closes the gate.

 

He ends up being seventeen minutes late- which is probably about the same time people start getting up for school- and is sopping wet, on the tail-end of a hiccup attack from eating the toast while running. He starts apologizing as soon as he gets through the door.

It’s only him, Natasha and Mr. Parsons, who is one out of the three guys that own the place, and he snorts loudly through his nose at Steve’s ragged breathing. “Steve, just shut up. You are by far the best employee we have in this shithole. You actually do _work_.” He hooks his thumb around at Natasha.

Steve forces a laugh that comes out sounding like a wheeze, because he had just run for five minutes in the rain and he’s a lot less fit than he should be.

“I’ll just,” he says, and then stops, out of breath, and nods towards the counter.

Mr. Parsons beams from under his thin moustache that quite frankly creeps Steve out, and claps him on the back. “Atta boy.”

Mr. Parsons, along with the other two guys that run the place- which Steve still doesn’t get, because it’s not a big shop and they don’t need three people to run it- have always had something about treating their employees like poodles. Patting them, barking orders, and using encouragements like ‘atta boy’ and ‘good girl.’

Steve is half expecting him to be told to fetch a stick when Mr. Parsons says, “Oh, and Steve?”

He turns, trying to get his breathing back to normal and silently cursing himself for not attending most of his gym classes for the past three years. “Yes, sir?”

“Are you interested in furthering yourself in this kind of thing?”

At Steve’s confused look, Mr. Parsons backtracks. “I mean, your career. _This_ career. We were wondering if you had any further plans about-”

“I’m saving for college,” Steve says before he can get any further. “I’ve- I haven’t really considered staying in town after high school. No offence, this is a great job, and I like it here, I just-”

“Bigger and better things,” Mr. Parsons finishes, and his smile is almost understanding, which is an alien look on him. “Well, there’s always a job for you here, if you want it. Keep that in mind, huh?”

Steve nods, sucks in a breath, and says, “Yeah. Thanks. Thank you, sir.”

Mr. Parsons moves like he’s going to give him a good-hearted punch on the shoulder, but then thinks better of it and takes a step back, nodding. “No problem. Have a good day at school.”

“Yeah,” Steve says again, partly because he only got four hours of sleep last night, partly because he still hasn’t done his Bio homework, and partly because he’s currently dripping all over the linoleum, which all add to a monosyllabic, fed-up teenager who is seriously considering taking a nap on one of the bins outside.

And it’s not even 7 a.m. yet.

 

He tips out the milk that Natasha burned earlier, and thinks about telling her, again, how to _not burn the goddamn milk_ , but then gives up on it because he’s tried to explain it to her at least eight times before and there’s only so much a guy can take before the sun comes up.

Actually, that’s a lie- the sun is up, barely, but it’s hard to tell through all the clouds that have been coming in.

“Natasha, there’s a customer,” Steve says, and when she doesn’t respond, he tries it louder.

She’s obviously considering continuing not to answer, but when Steve opens his mouth again, she lets the punnet of nail polish slap onto the counter.

“I’m painting my _nails_ ,” she says, and holds up her hand as proof. Three nails are electric blue, and she’s working her way through the fourth.

Steve has no idea how she even got the job here, but he doesn’t know how a lot of people in town got employed, because a majority of people he knows put zero effort into anything they do. That, and they smell horrible while doing it, and personally, Steve considers those two things as qualities that don’t come across as appealing as a potential employee.

The customer is a harried-looking guy in a cheap suit, and is glaring daggers at the menu on top of the shelves instead of the people who are supposed to be helping him get things from it.

He’s been coming in once every few days since Steve had started working here. On Tuesdays he always wears a tree with Christmas trees framing the edges, which Steve has decided he has to do because he lost a bet, because he’s been wearing it for months.

Some people have hobbies. Steve makes up things about strangers.

He knows the steps by now- he says, “Coffee?” And the guy says, “Jesus, yes, please.”

“What kind?”

“Any kind. Just give me coffee. Take away, not have here.”

And Natasha will snort behind him, reading a magazine or filing her nails or basically doing anything that doesn’t involve helping.

Today, the guy cuts him short and says, “Flat white. Take away. Thanks.”

It’s usually what Steve makes for him anyway, and he nods. “Coming right up.”

He turns to Natasha, who looks up at him with pursed lips and defiantly picks up the nail brush as he nudges past her.

In the kitchen- on the tables in the shop, even- there are teacups filled with rocks lining the windowsills, and in total, Steve has knocked three of them over and broken two of them. Apparently Mr. Parson’s wife had always had a thing for them- the rock-filled teacups, that is- and Steve had had to pay for them out of his own pocket.

Well, he’d had to pay for the teacup and pick up some pebbles from the driveway.

He gives them a wide berth anyway, flicking the espresso machine on and going over to grab a Styrofoam cup from the shelf.

When he turns around with the cup, Natasha is standing in the doorway with the bottle of nail polish still in one hand.

When she does nothing except continue to stand there, Steve says, “Uh. Are you going to help?”

She smirks, and her dimples bunch. “No. Are you going to the party this year?”

Steve opens his mouth to say ‘no’ before it even registers.

“I’m- thinking about it,” he says instead, and the words surprise him even as he says them.

 

There aren’t very many parties in a town like this, and if there are, then they get busted pretty soon into it because someone rats them out. Mostly, everyone just goes around to their friends’ houses and get drunk on whatever they can get off their parents.

But every year, when the rain starts for the spring and doesn’t stop for at least a week, they- ‘they’ being a majority of whoever happens to be in the last few years of high school at the time, mixed in with freshmen who get kicked out and college kids who everyone avoids- go down to the beach and have what could probably be called a party.

They try to have it on a day where the rain is light, it’s warm, and there’s minimal wind, otherwise everyone stands in the dunes, drinks beer and goes home after half an hour.

There’s always a tarp, stretched out across the dunes and over the flat sand, which takes about an hour to put up and stretches over the length of about half a football field- it doesn’t fit everyone in, but sometime through the night people start to go skinny-dipping, which leaves more room to take shelter under.

No-one wears shoes, and at least half of the people there come in swimsuits, especially if they’ve been before. Everyone ends up in less clothing than they start out with. And not just because of skinny-dipping; it’s more because no-one wants to go around with wet, grit-sodden clothes dragging them down.

Some parents try to stop it, but mostly the party gets left alone, due to the adults going to the same thing when they were their kid’s age.

Hell, Steve’s mom used to go to it when she was a Junior. Last year, when he was going over to Bruce’s to walk down to it together, he had gotten out of the car and kissed his mom goodbye.

She had hugged him tighter than she usually did, and when she drew back: “Your mom’s not an idiot, you know. Just- don’t wreck your pants, okay? They cost a lot, and seawater makes them all stiff.”

Steve had probably said something eloquent, like, “Wait, what?”

And she had grinned the grin that everyone tells Steve he had inherited, before leaning back towards the steering wheel. “Annual rainfall party tonight, right?”

“Uh,” Steve had said. “Yeah. Sorry I didn’t-”

“It’s fine,” she had said, waving dismissively. “Go. Be rebellious. And appreciate that damn tarpaulin; we had to cover our heads with our hands.”

Steve had laughed, and had done exactly that while running down Bruce’s driveway.

His pants had gotten ripped down the knee by a loose rock at some point that night, but his mom never said anything.

 

After their usual argument over whether a flat white is supposed to have foam or not, Steve asks Natasha to please put the cappuccino cups in the dishwasher that she forgot to do last night.

She makes a face, but when he’s carrying the coffee out (mindful of the rock-filled-teacups), he sees her put the nail polish down on the bench.

Sometimes she helps out with the orders, because if you want things done fast, you ask Natasha. But if you want things done well, you ask Steve.

Not that he never cuts corners- he cleans the tables by sweeping everything onto the floor and waiting for someone else to vacuum it, but at that point it’s the end of the day and he’s usually been in school for six hours before another five hours of work, and he’s too tired to do anything else.

The man is on his phone, like he always is, by the time Steve gets back carrying the coffee.

He says, “Sir,” twice, and gets a response on the second one in the form of the man looking up absently.

Steve holds the coffee out, and the man takes it with glassy eyes and no smile, but he says, “Thank you,” as he looks back down at his phone and turns for the door.

Opening it, the man almost bumps into Clint, who says, “Sorry,” and holds his hand out like he’s going to steady him.

“It’s fine,” the guy says vaguely, and steps past him, out the door before either of them can say anything else.

Clint’s hand is still raised, and he looks at it for a second, his gaze too heavy. His fingers curl, and he drops it.

“Hey,” Steve says, and stops.

“Hey,” Clint says, shoving his hands in his pocket like he’s pissed with them, looking at the ground. “Is Natasha here?”

When Steve doesn’t answer, Clint looks up.

Steve is sure his face is twisting, or that he’s staring, or something else that his mom would tell him off for. “What happened?”

Clint’s guard was already up, but at that, his eyes go steely. He lifts his chin, like he wants to bare his teeth, and it makes Steve think of a dog.

And maybe it’s intentional or maybe not, but lifting his chin throws the bruise into harsher definition, making it look heavier than it already was.

Clint says, “What’s it to you,” and Steve wants to tell him, _we’re not in the halls right now. You don’t have to do this._

From the kitchen, Natasha calls, “I’m here,” and Steve can hear something clattering onto the floor.

She comes around the corner, her hands smeared with coffee grit, and she’s smiling. “Hey, Beef. The usual?”

Steve watches as Clint’s shoulders relax, but only slightly.

At the moment, Natasha has piercings: a stud in her nose, three earrings in each ear, and a silver ball in her tongue. When she speaks, sometimes Steve can see a quick flash of it. Her hair is cropped short, and a hard, bleached blonde.

She’s one of the girls who drift between Packs- from Leathers to Meats to the Pot-Pack, to whatever she wants. She’s the kind of girl that sheds and grows a new reputation every time she dyes her hair.

Natasha is one of the rarities that doesn’t call him Clint, but knows who he hangs out with after school. She knows, and Clint trusts her. Or that’s what Steve thinks, at least- he’s pretty sure Natasha and Beef dated last year, but it was a mutual breakup. Or something.

He’s only heard her call him ‘Clint’ once, when they thought they were alone in the gym. Maybe she does the same thing- plays along, calls him ‘Beef’ when there are people around, to keep up appearances.

Sometimes, Steve thinks that Clint is her rarity, too.

“Hey, Natasha,” Clint says, and Steve can see the line blurring- Clint to Beef, Beef to Clint, shifting back and forth with every hunch of his shoulders. “The usual, yeah. And Tony is in the car, so.”

“As much caffeine as we can legally use,” Steve says without meaning to, the words stumbling before he can stop them.

And there it is again, the line blurring: Clint’s smile and Beef’s smirk, linking together at the mouth and leaving somewhere near his eyes.

“I don’t know what’s going on with you two,” Clint says, “and honestly, I don’t want to. Natasha, coffee?”

“Coming right up,” Natasha says.

Clint is one of the rarities, too. One she’ll actually make a coffee for and not completely butcher it up.

She stops at the door to the kitchen, one foot inside. “But if you make a ‘sammich’ joke, I swear to God-”

Clint laughs, and the lines flicker until Steve can’t tell which is which. “No sandwich jokes, I promise. You sort of _work_ here, Natasha, you have to get me a coffee.”

Natasha sniffs exaggeratedly. “Sexist pig.”

“Coffee,” Steve reminds her.

She rolls her eyes, but she pushes through the door so it swings shut behind her.

Steve doesn’t want to avoid Clint’s eyes, but he doesn’t want to look at him dead-on, either, so instead he just glances over Clint’s shoulder where there are dozens of pebble-filled-teacups, filled to the brim at the middle of every table, and wonders how long it’s going to take before he breaks another one.

“Bruce doesn’t know anything,” Clint says, too loud in the otherwise quiet hum of the shop, and it makes Steve startle. “If you were going to ask him.”

“I wasn’t,” Steve says, even thought he was. “But- Clint, you know if there’s something going on, you can tell someone, right? Tony, or Darcy, or whatever.”

“S’pose you wouldn’t believe me if I told you I got into a fight.”

“You don’t get into fights if you can help it.”

“Yeah, well.” Clint’s shoulders lift, filling out the jacket, and there are small, bunched cigarette burns on the sleeves that Steve didn’t notice before. “There’s always a first.”

Steve stands with his hip pressing into the cash register and Clint leans against the wall, hands still in his pockets, until Natasha gets back.

“Yours,” she says, handing Clint one of the covered cups, “and Tony’s.”

She glances over at Steve as she wipes her streaky hands on her apron. “I don’t know what crap he has in it, so I just dumped everything that you did when I watched you that one time. None of that shit is lethal, right?”

“In small doses,” Clint says, and he hasn’t taken his eyes off of her since she came out of the kitchen. “Do you guys have an arrangement with the school, or are you just always late?”

Natasha shrugs. “I’m late. He takes their car, and then runs. Like, _sprints_. It’s hilarious.”

“I bet,” Clint says, and he’s smiling the same smile that Bruce does sometimes, when Steve catches him off guard.

He nods at them, and starts for the door. “See you later.”

“See y-” Natasha stops, and leans over the counter. “Hey. Oi, Beef!”

Halfway out the door, Clint stops, and the rain is hitting one of his feet. “Yeah?”

Natasha’s hair- or what’s left of it- is dangling in front of her eyes, but she doesn’t seem to notice. “You coming to the party?”

“’Course. You?”

“Duh.”

Clint nods, and it’s small. His jacket is sagging now- it makes him look impossibly big if he puffs out his shoulders. But if he doesn’t, then it swallows him.

He nods again, and he’s drowning in the thick folds of his jacket again, and he says, again, “See you later.”

Steve and Natasha both say it back, and then the door is pushing open fully and Steve cranes his neck.

Over Clint’s shoulder in the three-second gap when the door is open, he catches a slice of Clint’s car through the thick sheets of rain- it’s blurred, but he can make out a figure in the passenger’s seat.

From here, Tony just looks like a smear through the glass, like it could be anyone.

 

 


	8. Chapter 8

It’s been three hours since Tony has woken up. He’s brushed his teeth, he’s drank a cup of coffee, and in a last-ditch attempt he’s gone into the handicapped stall and swigged some mouthwash, but there’s still the phantom taste of bile at the back of his throat. Which is both illogical and irritating, because he hasn’t even thrown up this morning.

He thinks he’s going to, though- he’s had a few close calls where his head had lurched and his stomach had swam and he had to lean against the lockers until it had passed.

The teacher is up the front, talking about frost wedging, and Tony is tuning in and out as he concentrates on not emptying the contents in his stomach (which is probably coffee and leftover vodka) over his shoes.

His hangovers aren’t usually like this. Most of the time the nausea fades after about an hour; less if he makes himself throw up. The only reason he hasn’t made himself throw up now is because in some way, vomiting in the school bathrooms during class seems like a new low to him. That, and his Biology teacher doesn’t give out hall passes unless you’re bleeding out on the desk.

A chair beside him scrapes, and he startles, sitting up.

“Hey,” Steve says, lowering his voice until Tony can hardly hear him. “Have you seen Bruce?”

It takes a few sluggish seconds for Tony’s brain to catch up, because Steve is leaning over so he doesn’t have to speak so quietly, and the overhead projector is catching him in thatches across his face, scattering light.

He’s out of breath- Steve is always out of breath in first period; his chest dragging in and out, his skin sticking to the thin material of his shirt.

Tony has to replay the last minute in his head to realize what the question was. “No. Nope. I’m going to take an educated guess and say you saw Cli- Beef?”

Steve looks at him, annoyance playing out across his face. “No-one’s listening. You don’t have to call him Beef.”

“Wh-? Yeah, I know no-one’s listening.” Tony always finds himself thrown off whenever Steve talks to him, and never in a good way. “Just- we’re at school. Habit. So, you saw his face?”

“I saw the bruise, yeah,” Steve says, and Tony can feel his breath, thudding and out of place against his neck. “I texted Bruce. He said Clint was in his room when he got home yesterday and had left before he got up this morning.”

“So?”

“So,” Steve says, leaning even closer, looking more frustrated by the second, “He could be lying?”

Tony folds his arms. Then unfolds them. Then folds them again before deciding he hates it, and at the same time decides that everything delivers with more emphasis this way. “Why would he be lying?”

“Why do rape victims not tell anyone they were raped,” Steve says darkly, and then looks like he regrets it. “Sorry, that’s- I mean- I get that Clint- or Bruce, whatever- just want to get it over with and not have to think about it, or have people point it out, okay? I get it. And I’m not going to pretend to know what’s going on, or even understand it, because I have no idea what’s happening. And- look, I just want them to be okay, and I know you want the same thing. We can’t _force_ them to talk about it, but-”

“But it’s been years and we haven’t got jack shit,” Tony stops him. “Yeah. Well, I’m all for dangling them over a pit of rabid crocodiles until they spill, but unfortunately, I’m all out of wild animals for the moment. Up to and including crocodiles.”

There’s a flash of a smile, and Tony catches the tail end of it as Steve looks down.

“I think we should put a pin in the crocodile idea,” Steve says. “At least for now. I’m not crossing anything out at this point. But I think we should do something.”

Tony leans forwards on his elbows, and blames 99% of his stomach flipping on the fact that he’s still pretty drunk right now, and not because of how there’s a freckle on one of Steve’s knuckles- a darker brown than his skin, small and flecked over to the left of his index finger, and Tony has a terrifying urge to press his mouth to it.

He smiles, still tasting bile and dried blood caked at the back of his teeth. “As long as the next word out of your mouth isn’t ‘police,’ then agreed. Definitely all-in for the doing something thing. Also, a big no-no on child services.”

Steve frowns, but it’s not a cross frown, just a downward pull. “Why not child services?”

“For one, they’re not kids. Two, they’re both moving out in, like, a year.” Tony raises a hand to chew on his nails, but then stops himself, because he gave that up when he started smoking. “And three, we don’t even know if it’s their parents.”

“We don’t _know_ it’s the parents,” Steve agrees, “but I don’t see who else it could be.”

Tony shrugs. “A creepy uncle that lives in the garage? A random homeless person? Fuck, we don’t know what’s going on in their lives except for a small portion of their homework assignments, and we’re two of their closest friends. And you probably know a hell of a lot more about Bruce than I know about B- Clint, anyway.”

“He doesn’t tell me everything,” Steve says after a while, “but I think he has less to hide.”

Tony says, “Fair enough.”

There’s a silence, and it’s then that Tony realizes how close together they are- he can still feel Steve’s breath on his neck, although it’s evened out since he’s sat down. He can feel his body heat through Steve’s shirt- their arms are close together on the desk, and their sleeves are almost brushing, wrist to wrist.

Steve’s wrists are skinny- skinnier than the rest of him, that is. He’s always been skinny, but then again, he’s always been broad. Big hands and feet, wide, flat shoulders and a huge expanse of back and chest, but still skinny.

His wrists, though- his wrists are small, and weirdly pale. They’re almost delicate, and Tony wants to trail a finger down one of them to see if they’re as soft as they look.

Tony shifts his arm to a safe distance, his throat clicking. “So, what do we do?”

“Um.” Steve worries at the end of his sleeves with his long fingers, and Tony wants those fingers tracing the bow of his bottom lip so hard it feels like he’s going to puke.

Which would solve the queasiness problem, actually. Puking once or twice usually makes it fade away, if you give him a few minutes to rest his head against the toilet bowl.

“I don’t know,” Steve says. “I thought we could just- be there for them, for the time being.”

Tony snorts without meaning to. “What do you think we’ve all been doing since high school started?”

Again, he sees the half-smile before Steve looks down again. “Touché. But in the long run, I- we-” his shoulders slump forwards, one hand coming up to rub over his face. “I have no idea what to do. Shit.”

He groans quietly into his hand. “Can we go back to your plan? The one with the crocodiles?”

“Let’s make that plan C,” Tony says, and tries not to sound too pleased. “A backup plan, if you will.”

“Backup plan,” Steve repeats dubiously, and his eyes pinch shut, like he’s trying not to imagine Clint and Bruce being tied by their ankles above a pit of crocodiles. “Right. Okay. We can do that. What do you think we should do?”

Tony is halfway to saying, _crawl into our individual pits of denial like every other day_ , but his teeth bite down on the tip of his tongue before it forces its way out, remembering the desperate, angry cast of Clint’s eyes as he had said it before.

He almost says _, I don’t know, how am I supposed to know, none of us are even old enough to be legally allowed to drink_ , but swallows it down with the imagined bile and dried blood.

Under his breath, he says, “Oh, bugger it,” to himself, and isn’t expecting it when Steve laughs.

Steve has a specific kind of laugh when Tony makes him do it, he’s noticed: it’s soft and quick and surprised, curling to the roof of his mouth like the only cigarette that Tony has ever seen him smoke.

He gets the full bite of his smile this time- no half-assed ones, just an oversized, accidental, uncoordinated smile of a clumsy guy with skinny wrists.

“Sorry,” Steve says, but he’s smiling the smile of someone who’s trying hard not to grin. “It’s just- that was really British of you. Sorry. Um.”

“Wow, I wonder why,” Tony says, and he’s smiling back even though he’s trying not to, and he feels sick on three different levels, which hasn’t happened before. One of them is a good kind of sick, though, which he’s familiar with, but it’s sickly-sweet at the back of his throat, mixing with the bile. “Maybe because I lived in England for over a decade?”

Steve says, “Maybe,” and his smile falters slightly. His gaze flickers.

There isn’t a safe distance between them- maybe an inch or so- and for a delirious moment, Tony thinks, _fuck, maybe there isn’t a minimum safe distance_.

They’re close enough for Tony to lean forward and touch him- forehead to forehead, ankle to ankle, shoulder to shoulder, and Tony always finds himself touching Steve accidentally, even if he tries not to.

Little touches, tiny, meaningless touches that scream of empty spaces more than anything else. Brushing his hand as he passes, pulse points and pressure points colliding when he’s too distracted to pull away in time. Standing too close and nicking his neck when he turns. Bumping into him when he’s making for his locker and not being able to apologize without stumbling over ‘sorry.’

He remembers, again: doing things out of fear or seeking pleasure, and tries to pry the two apart, because there’s a freckle cutting through Steve’s eyebrow, and another one on the blunt nudge of his jaw, and Tony is trying to lean in and shove away at the same time.

Their knees bump under the table: horrible corduroy against blue jeans, and Tony realizes that he’s never really fell in love; he’s slipped.

He jolts in his chair, jerking backwards, suddenly hyper-aware of the hickey branding a mark into his neck, and how he’s freaking out over their knees touching through two layers of fabric.

The chair rocks, and everything slides sideways in a way that probably means he’s going to throw up in the nearest pot plant, if he can find one. This happens for hours, sometimes- he teeters on the verge of throwing up, but unless he actually makes himself throw up, he continually feels like he’s on the verge of it until at least two hours later.

“Yeah,” he croaks, throat dry and still tasting puke. “I don’t know what we should do. About Clint and Bruce. Is what I mean. So, I’m- I’m-”

The room is tilting sideways in a way that Tony is worryingly used to. “I need to throw up.”

Steve says, “You need to-?” and then he gets that expression that Tony is also worryingly used to. “Are you drunk?”

“From last night,” Tony says. “Does that count? I don’t think it does. It totally doesn’t. Anyway, can you cover for me?”

For a second, Steve opens his mouth, but whatever he was going to say, he smothers it with: “And say what?”

“That I needed to throw up,” Tony tells him, and lurches to his feet.

He can hear the teacher calling after him, but he’s too busy grabbing the doorframe and pushing past it, not bothering to fumble the door closed again because suddenly he feels about three times as drunk as he did half an hour ago, and he blames Steve’s freckles entirely.

The bathroom is across the hall, and everything booms up towards him every time he takes a step. He uses two hands on the doorknob, because apparently he can’t handle basic coordination skills at the moment, and drops to his knees in front of one of the toilet bowls.

It’s not pleasant- it never is, and he knows the angle to make his fingers by now, and it’s not like he’s bulimic or anything, he just wants to get the alcohol out of his system.

He uses two fingers to push over his tongue, down his throat, and gags slightly at the intrusion. He pushes them further, as gently as he can make it, and rubs at the soft, spongy bulge at the back of his throat- he learned the name in freshman year, but he can’t for the life of him care enough to remember it now- until he feels it start to come up his throat.

He throws up over his fingers, bowing his head into the bowl, and breathes in hard through his nose.

It’s completely liquid- coffee and alcohol, but mostly alcohol, dripping along with a thin string of saliva from his mouth after he stops convulsing. It hits him that he probably hasn’t eaten anything since leftover Chinese before he had passed out at Pepper’s office.

Again, he wiggles his fingers, and this time it comes out with more force. Usually he gets his fingers out of the way, but there’s going to be spit to wash off anyway, so he just keeps them there and feels the warm vomit spill over his hand, watery and disgusting and stinking of alcohol every time.

He repeats this four more times, producing next to nothing, but he’s feeling less light-headed now, so that has to count for something.

There’s a light sheen of sweat on his forehead, which is something that always happens when he does this- not that he has to do this often- and the toilet bowl lid feels unbelievably cool against his forehead when he leans into it.

For a while, he just lies there and breathes, his right hand angled awkwardly at his side so he doesn’t smear something on his clothes, until he can stand up without anything spinning.

 _New low_ , he tells himself blearily.

He pumps the pink soap with his left hand, and scrubs the vomit from under his fingernails- another unfortunate side effect.

He doesn’t know what time it is. He doesn’t know what class he has. He briefly considers going home- the annual week of the first rain of spring is the worst week for attendance out of the entire year, so he wouldn’t exactly be missed.

Someone comes in after a while- Tony goes to sit back in his stall, closing the door, and waits for the guy to piss, wash his hands, and then the slap of the bathroom door closing again.

He’s not sober now, but he’s not that far from it, so it’s almost easy to push the buttons on his phone. Pepper is on speed dial, anyway, so he only has to press ‘2.’

She picks up on the forth ring, like always. “Hey. Got any exciting new psychological problems, or just the usual?”

“Do you think I’m an alcoholic?”

Pepper’s silence sounds more like static than anything, but it only lasts for a few beats and then she’s saying, almost too quietly, “Where the hell did- You’re not an alcoholic, you stupid bastard. Why the bloody hell would you think that?”

Tony shrugs to himself, wiping a hand across his mouth- he’s going to have to detour to the handicapped bathroom and have another pull of that mouthwash. It’s probably run out by now.

“I haven’t woken up without a hangover in- two weeks? Two weeks-ish. And even before that, it was, uh. Patchy. And I just had to run out of class to stick my fingers down my throat so I didn’t go around feeling like shit for the next two classes. And I’ve started carrying vodka in my bag, and I don’t even _like_ vodka-”

“You’re not an alcoholic,” Pepper says, and her voice has an edge to it that wasn’t there a minute ago. “You display habits that are- worrying, towards alcohol, but a lot of people go through this phase at least once in their lives, especially in their adolescence.”

She does this sometimes- accidentally switches into therapy mode. It’s rare, but it happens, and when it does, she tries to tamp it down. For him, at least.

He thinks she notices, because she clears her throat quietly before she continues: “Some of them stop, and some of them-”

“Turn into alcoholics.”

Pepper’s silence is grating, every time it comes. “It’s not an ideal thing to be. But there are worse things to be, trust me. My best friends in college were highly-functioning alcoholics, and they were great.”

Tony’s throat hurts when he laughs, like it always does after throwing up. It feels raw, almost puffy, and it scrapes when he swallows.

Pepper says, “Why the sudden worry about all of this? Your usual tactic towards things like this consists of hiding under a rock until you can successfully ignore it.”

Tony tugs his sleeves over his hands, closing them into fists with his sleeves in them to keep them there. It’s always cold in the bathrooms. “Apparently I can only do the whole denial thing with so many things at a time, and I’ve used up my quota for this week. So what you’re saying is that I’m not an alcoholic, but I’m currently heading that way?”

“I didn’t say that,” Pepper says, and it comes out sharper than Tony thinks she meant it to. “Have you ever tried to stop?”

“What, drinking? Not really. I’d sort of prefer not to.”

“But if you tried, do you think you’d be able to?”

Back in class, at the bottom of his bag, there’s a bottle of vodka in between his pencil case and three maths sheets that he still doesn’t know how to do. The neck of his bottle always strains into the zip, because that’s the only way he can get it to fit comfortably.

“I’d sort of prefer not to,” he repeats, and his head is still ringing, but it’s fading. “But if I tried, then I guess so.”

He brings one sleeve to drag across his forehead, smearing sweat and remembering. “But my semi-hysterical freakout isn’t, ah, our number one priority right now. Hey, hypothetically, do you rememb-?”

The ‘hypothetically’ makes him stop.

_Hypothetically, I have a moronic, blind, maybe-more-than-crush on a guy who might be my friend._

_Hypothetically, Bruce might turn up to school with a bruise someday soon._

_Hypothetically, I have no idea what I’m doing with anything, ever._

But Pepper laughs, completely oblivious to Tony’s sudden existential crisis. “At least half of our bad ideas start with one of us saying ‘hypothetically.”

“Shut up,” Tony says. He swallows, and lets his head drop sideways onto the wall of the stall, flattening one side of his hair. “Uh. Remember Clint?”

“That ‘Beef’ guy?”

“Yeah.”

“Definitely. That kid is a goldmine for whatever court-ordered therapist he gets when he’s older.”

“Thanks,” Tony says, and doesn’t laugh. “I’ll tell him you said that. It’s- do you happen to have a spare crocodile pit I could use? It’s for a good cause.”

“Not on me at the moment.”

Again, Tony doesn’t laugh, but his mouth crooks up. He can still taste vomit, thin and heady around the back of his throat and under his tongue, and he thinks he tastes some of his stomach acid.

He’s almost completely sober now, if not for the reluctant drag that his eyes make when he looks up. “Pepper?”

“Yes?”

“Do you consider yourself an alcoholic?”

She snorts, but again, it’s quiet. “I think I have an unhealthy relationship with it, not unlike a certain person I’m on the phone with right now. But like I said, there are worse things to be.”

“None of this is putting me at ease,” Tony says dryly, and the throbbing at the back of his head is barely noticeable now.

“You’re not an alcoholic,” she tells him. “Get the vomit out of your clothes, don’t breathe in anyone’s face for the rest of the day- especially teachers, I’m serious, they notice that shit- and drop by my place when school gets out, okay?”

 _There are worse things to be_ , Tony thinks to himself.

“Bring noodles.”

She sighs, but he can tell she’s smiling. “What is with you and your fascination with leftover takeout?”

“Obviously it’s a sign of deep emotional scarring that you’re going to have to pry out of me with your breathtaking psychology skills.”

“Work, work, work,” Pepper laughs, and faintly, Tony can hear the radio on in the background. She always has the radio on when she’s at home, unless she’s watching TV. Tony thinks it’s because something about a lack of background noise makes her worm her way inside her own head, which probably wouldn’t be all that pleasant for a therapist: knowing the scientific name of what’s wrong with you, down to the name of the pills you should take for it.

He says, “See you then,” and she says, “Damn right you will,” and he hangs up a second after she does.

When he pushes himself up, everything stays where it is and nothing tilts.

 

 


	9. Chapter 9

**_To: Tony_ **

**_From: Darcy_ **

_The sexuality crisis pack omg_

**_To: Darcy_ **

**_From: Tony_ **

_What_

**_To: Tony_ **

**_From: Darcy_ **

_It should be our pack name_

**_To: Darcy_ **

**_From: Tony_ **

_Is this seriously how you chose to come out to me_

**_To: Tony_ **

**_From: Darcy_ **

_I went through my sexuality crisis like a year before you did and helped you with yours so fuck you. Is that a no on the name_

****

**_To: Darcy_ **

**_From: Tony_ **

_I’m pretty sure we can do better than ‘the sexuality crisis pack.’ And I still think Clint is straight_

**_To: Tony_ **

**_From: Darcy_ **

_Fair enough. Also a little birdie told me you threw up in Bio what’s up with that_

**_To: Darcy_ **

**_From: Tony_ **

_That is both crass and false and I am insuld that you believed it_

****

**_To: Darcy_ **

**_From: Tony_ **

_*insulted_

**_To: Darcy_ **

**_From: Tony_ **

_Anyway what little birdie told you_

****

**_To: Tony_ **

**_From: Darcy_ **

_That would be telling_

****

**_To: Darcy_ **

**_From: Tony_ **

_Tell me woman_

**_To: Tony_ **

**_From: Darcy_ **

_That Peter Parker dude_

**_To: Darcy_ **

**_From: Tony_ **

_That asshole omg. I now despise and loathe him and will never let him bum a cigarette off me ever again_

**_To: Tony_ **

**_From: Darcy_ **

_So why did you throw up in Bio_

**_To: Darcy_ **

**_From: Tony_ **

_Would you believe there was a dissection and I suddenly became squeumish_

**_To: Darcy_ **

**_From: Tony_ **

_*squeamish_

**_To: Tony_ **

**_From: Darcy_ **

_You are the worst liar ever_

**_To: Darcy_ **

**_From: Tony_ **

_I’m a great liar_

**_To: Tony_ **

**_From: Darcy_ **

_Not to me. We have a free period come to study hall_

**_To: Darcy_ **

**_From: Tony_ **

_K_

 

They don’t even try to study. Tony gets there, they both stare wordlessly at the textbook that Darcy has lying in front of her, unopened, before he sits down and pushes it away with his bag.

“You look like crap,” she tells him, and he sighs loudly.

“Thank you, Darcy, for that helpful and generous observation. People often look like crap after they throw up in a public bathroom. What’s Kirsty S. reading today?”

For a second, Darcy opens her mouth to say something like, _you are the worst person at changing subjects, ever_ , but stops just before she does, pursing her lips. She bends backwards in her seat, angling her neck sideways so she can see the cover. “ _Pride and Prejudice_. And she shaved her head again.”

Kirsty S. is the kind of girl who wears a beanie that should have been thrown out in the 90s and sits in the back of the room reading long, pretentious novels just for the sake of people seeing her sit in the back of the room reading long, pretentious novels. Also, she seems to have a thing for shaving her head in spiral patterns, because apparently her sister, who is in college, does it as well.

Tony grunts, which is a weird sound to hear from him, because he never grunts. He has the most extensive vocabulary out of anyone that Darcy knows, and he sure as hell knows how to use it. He adds needless adjectives into sentences for no reason, and draws everything out longer than it needs to be, so he doesn’t grunt, he _rants_. About everything. Constantly.

Complete with hand gestures, too- she’s seen him have to apologize to strangers on the bus on three separate occasions for accidentally catching them with an out of control limb.

So it’s more than mildly disturbing to see him put his chin in his hand and say, “Whatever.”

Darcy realizes that, apart from using it to mock people and/or for sarcasm, she has never once heard Tony say ‘whatever.’

She watches him for a second- the half-glaze of his eyes, how his hand is pulling up the skin of his cheek.

“Did something else happen?”

He doesn’t startle. Instead, he just looks up at her, his chin pressing into his palm. “What, other than my majestic and quite frankly epic encounter with the school toilets and the contents of my stomach? Which, by the way, was literally 100% liquid, so I should probably eat something at some point today.”

He still isn’t lifting his head, but the wordplay is back, which makes Darcy less concerned about hiding all the closest sharp objects.

“Nope,” Tony continues, folding his arms so they lie on the desk and placing his chin on top of them. “Nothing happened. My mind is just a shitty place to be in at the moment. Also, I think I might have broken Clint a weensy bit.”

The last bit is said in a mumble, and Darcy’s heels clip the chair opposite her as her feet slide off of it. “What did you do?”

Tony shrugs, and his whole body shifts with it. “I said something? I don’t know, he came back with our coffee and he looked all smiley and he had that colossal freaking bruise on his eye, and I just-”

“What bruise?”

This time, Tony’s head moves upwards, and he looks slightly guilty. “Uh. He may have a bruise the size of- of half his face. On his face. It’s incredibly purple. Sort of grape-ish.”

Darcy mouths, _grape-ish_ , and her mouth sets in a line. “Well. Fuck. Is he pissed at you?”

“If by ‘pissed’ you mean had a minor breakdown at me in the car and then barely talked to me the entire car ride here,” Tony says into his sleeves, “then yes, I’d say he’s pissed at me.”

Darcy breathes out through her nose, pushing her hands into her hair and holding them there. She goes through her schedule in her head- next is lunch, and then Psychology, and suddenly she couldn’t care less about anything to do with school, much less the names of disorders that they’ve been instructed to learn. “Hey, do you want to ditch?”

 _That_ makes Tony finally sit up, his hand already closing around the straps of his bag. “You just read my mind.”

 

They have to act like they’re walking along a line of trees for a few minutes, out of the way of the rain, because Mr. Woods, the P.E. teacher, is having a coffee break under the veranda. When he gets up from the bench, rubbing a hand over his bald spot, he gives both of them a look.

They wave innocently, and he cocks his eyebrow in a way that means he knows what they’re doing, but they both know he can’t exactly bust them for skulking around the trees.

“We have a free period,” Darcy calls.

Mr. Woods smiles tightly, and gives them the thumbs up before turning away, towards the back door of the gym.

It’s a widely-known fact that if you want to ditch, there are two ways to do it: the shorter way is to take the one straight out the gate, but the office is right next to it and most of the people who try it get caught, unless you crawl along your belly for eight metres so they don’t see you through the window. And even then, teachers come and go at all hours of the day, and as of yet, no-one has managed to make a plausible excuse as to why they’re pulling themselves along on their stomachs underneath the window.

That, and you get the front of your clothes dirty. In general, it just seems like too much effort if you’re bored or stressed enough to ditch.

The second option is to go along a length of chestnut trees behind the gymnasium, hop the fence, and then walk around the back of school  (which is a field full of cherry trees that nowadays come up to their shoulders, because the old principal wanted to be more ‘environmentally friendly’ ) to the bus stop. Unless you’re dumb enough to try to jump the fence with teachers around, it’s a guaranteed getaway.

As soon as Mr. Woods closes the side door the gym behind him, Darcy loops her bag around Tony’s neck and hikes one leg over the fence, then the other. Water splashes up her tights, just below her knees, as she lands.

She swears quietly, and lifts one leg to unaffectedly shake the water off, extending one hand. “Bag.”

Tony unhooks the bag from around his neck and hands it to her, along with his own bag, and uses both hands to brace against the fence before vaulting over, both feet staying clear of the top of the wire as he does.

Darcy hands his bag to him and shoves him lightly in the shoulder as she does. “Fucking showoff.”

Tony just grins, and it looks less papery this time, less like it’s going to dissolve in the rain.

There are blossoms hanging from the trees, now- most of them are only just unfurling, and the others are bunched together in thick, dark bulbs. They’re all dripping, and the branches dampen their clothes as they push past them.

 

Their town is wholly unremarkable in every way, except for one: when the rain dies down, tourists come in droves for the cherry blossoms, which is actually most of everyone doesn’t go bankrupt.

There are rows and rows of cherry trees along most of the streets, through everyone’s backyard, outside of the buildings. Every year they’ve been at this school, Darcy has dragged someone out to lie out in the fields behind school, and look up at the blossoms.

But the best ones are the ones on the fringe of the beach, just before the dirt ends. The branches reach out over the sand, over everyone’s heads- they’re the tallest blossom trees in town, and no matter what Darcy has done, no matter how high she’s stretched up her hands or jumped on her tiptoes, she’s never managed to scrape the bottom branches.

It’s one of her first memories, actually: after Samantha had gone to college, before school, before Bobby; when Jane had been a swell that her mother always had her hands over, and Darcy had been feeling like an only child for the first and last time in her life.

She only remembers a snapshot of it- her mother three feet away, smiling like she doesn’t anymore, and her father laughing like he still does sometimes, and his hands around Darcy’s middle and hoisting her up on his shoulders.

She remembers the soft bark of her mother’s laughter, her wrinkles bunching at the sides of her eyes, and the squeeze of her father’s fingers as he settles Darcy’s legs around his neck.

“Look at all those starry blossoms,” he had said, and she still remembers it: the lilt of his voice, striking clear and clean, how it had cut through everything else like parting the sea, like the side-parting of his hair that turned out to be hereditary.

Tipping her head up at that moment, they had looked like stars: blooming and bunched and beautiful, clustered together in constellations above their heads with the real stars pinpricking between them in the empty spaces.

And Darcy isn’t the same girl as she was back when the sand was warm and her mother had laughed with her head thrown back, but she turns sideways to Tony.

“Look at all those starry blossoms.”

Tony is blinking the rain from his eyes, trying to cover his head and his bag at the same time as they make a beeline for the bus, but he catches what she says as they bump shoulders. “What?”

“Never mind,” Darcy tells him, and doesn’t know why she said it in the first place. She pulls her coat tighter around her waist, because it doesn’t fit around her chest, due to boobage. Which is totally a word in her personal dictionary.

She breathes through her teeth, and it doesn’t come out in a cloud like she expects it to. It’s spring, so it should be warm, but apparently winter is leaving reluctantly this year. The rainfall week of the year has always been stop-and-start when it comes to weather, anyway- as long as there’s rain, anything goes.

“Fuck, it’s cold. I hate cold rain.”

“I hate warm rain,” Tony says, shielding his face with one hand although it barely does anything to protect from the water. “Or any type of rain, actually. I hate it with an ever-burning, eternal, passionate hate that transcends space and time and defies all laws of physics, including how your bra is able to hold your breasts up.”

One of the things that Darcy likes about him- he twists everything and turns it into something spectacular. And right now it’s almost see-through, and it’s obvious he’s trying too hard to sound normal, but Darcy appreciates it anyway.

“Fucking drama queen,” Darcy says, and gets a glare from the bus driver as they pass her.

In all their extensive history of ditching, not one bus driver has asked them if they should be in school. Tony told Darcy once that he thinks it’s because they feel an unspoken bond with them since they used to ditch when they were in school, which then lead to them failing, which then lead to their inevitable and disappointing career as bus drivers.

Darcy smiles, remembering, and lets Tony take the window seat, sliding in after him.

She’s never been good at gaging how drunk people are unless they’re passed out on her lap, so she takes in Tony’s posture, how his hands sit, how his words have or haven’t slurred for the past few minutes.

She’s halfway through deciding he’s mostly sober when she realizes that Tony has been drunk more often than he’s been sober lately.


	10. Chapter 10

Tony is the exception.

Apart from him, Pepper is a completely normal, boring therapist who wears beige and nods a lot and doesn’t let her shoddy personal life affect her work.

Apart from Tony, she’s sensible. She wears the goddamn hairpin and the goddamn glasses and does her goddamn job, and she’s goddamn good at it. Or passable, at least. The bottom line is that she earned every single one of her qualifications without having to sleep with anyone.

She’s quite proud of that, actually.

She is a professional therapist, not to mention officially an _adult_ , and has been for a good long while now, so when she reads the post-it notes that Billy has given her, she turns off the radio and slowly and calmly dials Tony instead of calling it a day and bringing out the bottle of whiskey she has artfully hidden away in one of her locked drawers.

She doesn’t give him time to say hello when he picks up. “That Beef guy’s last name wouldn’t happen to be ‘Barton-Banner,’ would it?”

Tony is quiet for a second before saying, “There’s a distinct possibility of it, why?”

 _Shit_. “Because he’s my 2:30 appointment.”

“Shit,” Tony says flatly.

“My sentiments exactly,” Pepper says, pushing the phone into the crook of her neck and holding it there with her shoulder so her hands are free to shuffle through the papers. “He’s not going to throw a chair at me, is he? Because I really hate it when people do that, and it happens more often than I’d prefer. Which is never. I’d prefer if I never had chairs thrown at me.”

There are other post-its, but most of them are about her appointments tomorrow, so she pushes them to the side of her desk and opens the folder where there’s a picture of Clint Barton-Banner- twelve, nervous and that hideous stage of prepubescent where every move is awkward and you basically spend two years with acne and a high voice and have a constant urge to use your inhaler to cave in your skull to stop the crippling embarrassment of your existence- on top of a few pages of doctor’s notes, teacher’s reports and probably a lot else that Pepper is going to have to skim through so it looks like she pays attention.

On the other end of the phone she can hear music playing, and Tony is saying, “Wait, 2:30? Won’t he have to get taken out of school?”

“Bet he’ll love that,” Pepper says, and reaches over for her snowglobe. She shakes it, and the plastic snow cascades downwards, onto the deer and snowman who have expressions that would permanently traumatise a toddler if they ever saw them on happy-go-lucky animals with clothes and opposable thumbs.

She shakes it again, rolling it over in her hands and watching the snow gather at the wrong end. “Again, will he throw a chair at me? You know I bruise like a peach.”

“He won’t throw a chair at you,” Tony sighs. “Well, he won’t unless you throw one first. Then it’s an all-chair-throwing frenzy, and all bets are off. Don’t throw anything at him and you should be fine.”

“No promises,” Pepper says, and wonders briefly how a sixteen year old is smarter than most of the people her age that she’s met in the past decade or so. Or at least a hell of  a lot more interesting.

“So, I’m guessing I don’t tell him that you’ve basically spilled everything there is to know about him while drunk and pissed off that one time last year?”

Radio silence for a few seconds, and then: “It’d be awesome if you could hold off on that, yes. And, ah.”

She hears him swallow, and in the background, someone is singing that what goes around comes around.

“Never mind,” Tony says, and it sounds quieter than usual, and Pepper remembers the thin slice in his voice as he had said, _am I an alcoholic_? “You’ll see it. Am I still coming over this afternoon?”

“Unless you want to miss out on the bad action moves and generic brand popcorn we’ll be eating.”

“Wouldn’t miss it for the world.”

“Good,” Pepper says, and rubs the pad of one finger over the glass of her snow-globe. It’s still as smooth as the day she got it. “By the way, where the hell are you?”

In the background on Tony’s end, the song ends and a loud radio anchor with an obnoxious voice starts to talk about winning a competition.

“Uh,” Tony says. “Media studies?”

“Tony Stark, you are without a doubt the shittiest liar I’ve ever met.”

“That is foul, unjust and untrue,” Tony says. And after a pause: “That’s also the second time someone’s told me that today.”

Pepper wedges the phone tighter into her shoulder- she’s horrible at this, and most of the time she ends up having to apologize to clients for dropping it in the middle of a conversation. “That usually indicates that you’re a shitty liar. Did you drag anyone else down into your shameful pit of ditching and therefore failing at school, jobs and life in general?”

“Drama queen,” Tony says, and there’s a brief silence where the radio host continues to half-yell and Pepper fiddles with the screws in her snowglobe.

“McDonalds,” Tony says finally. “Darcy and I took the bus. She’s in the loo.”

Pepper nods, and then remembers that she’s on the phone and says, “Right. Don’t get caught.”

“Pepper, I’ve done this literally millions of times, I’m not going to-”

“Figuratively,” Pepper corrects, reaching for a hairtie and twining it down around her wrist. “And I’m wisely going to ignore that.”

“Jolly good,” Tony says, overdoing the accent.

“Most indubitably,” Pepper replies in the same voice.

“Simply spiffing.”

“Gee willikers and also gosh.”

“Tea.”

Pepper laughs into the phone and takes it with one hand. “I can’t top that. You win this round of being British.”

“Tune in next week,” Tony says, without the usual kick, and Pepper can hear shards of their last conversation in his voice, dragging it down.

 

There’s a bruise over Clint’s eye when he comes in, and it’s going black from the inside out. When he notices she’s looking he hefts out his chin defensively, like, _come on. I dare you._

She doesn’t think he even notices he’s doing it.

“You can sit down,” she tells him, and Clint has to look over his shoulder to see the couch.

His eyes flicker over it- Pepper chose a couch because she hates those rigid chairs in the waiting room, but realized at the checkout that on some level, most of her clients would think that it’s because it makes them feel more comfortable, which will make them want to open up more, which make them feel like they’re being played. The smarter ones would figure it out, at least.

She brought it anyway, because if she has to listen to people bitch about their lives for six hours a day, she doesn’t want them to look uncomfortable while they’re doing it and give them one more thing to bitch about.

Clint looks up at her again before sitting down, the couch dipping under his weight. He spreads his shoulders in a way that reminds Pepper of a bird fluffing its feathers at a threat, and suddenly he’s twice as big instead of the jacket being two sizes too small.

He looks exactly like Pepper expects him to- angry and lost and looking for something, anything, which probably isn’t there in the first place. Stale cigarette smoke clings to his hair and to his clothes, and he has that weary, sort of pinched look that most eleven-to-nineteen-year-olds have when they get sent to her: the belated realization that you aren’t who you thought you were, or hoped you were, and that everyone else isn’t either, and on top of that, a vast majority of the world sucks ass.

To hell with platypuses, because teenagers, Pepper has realized, are some of the most interesting creatures on the planet. They’re saturated in their own raging hormones, in newfound expectations that everyone has started hammering at them.

They’re drowning in the act of finding out, piece by disappointing piece, that their parents are not, in fact, infallible. In trying to find their footing in their own identity, not to mention having to face the inevitable certainty that one day they’re actually going to have to comprehend and pay taxes, which in Pepper’s opinion is more than enough incentive to fling yourself off the nearest building.

They’re fumbling, stumbling, howling messes, struggling to find out how to be and shooting themselves in the foot as they do it.

In short, they’re the reason why she passed every Psych essay she ever wrote in college with flying colours.

She tries for a smile and watches the routine suspicion set in, like every question they proceed to answer is somehow going to get them put in an institution. Like, if they tell her what kind of breakfast cereal they like and it turns out to be the one that means you’re dangerous to yourself and others and should never be allowed outside ever again without a crew of highly-trained snipers and security guards watching your every move.

Which in Pepper’s opinion is Wheaties, but whatever.

She can approach this one of two ways: she can sidestep him, she can learn where to dig the knife and where to push a bit harder- which she’s going to learn anyway, but she could do it slowly if she wanted- or she can shove right in without looking.

She considers her options on what to say next before deciding that whatever she tries is going to get her a glare in return, so she settles for, “Nice face. What happened?”

Clint balks, understandably. Then he clams up like she knew he would, shutting down more than he already has.

“Got in a fight,” he says, and that’s all he says.

Pepper nods. She’s not going to take notes- everyone hates it when she takes notes, and there’s something about the scratch of a pen in a silent room that makes something curl up inside her gut. “I bet you get in a lot of fights; big guy like you.”

He reacts like clockwork, his fists clenching, and it’s one of the reasons she hates this job.

“I,” he says, and his hands are curling and uncurling in his pockets. “Yeah.”

Pepper nods again. “I’m Pepper Potts.”

“I know,” Clint says. He’s looking her right in the face. “I’ve heard stuff about you.”

“They’re all true,” Pepper says. “But just to check- who, pray tell, told you said things?”

Clint shifts in his seat, and the jacket strains against his shoulders. “Tony told me some stuff. And Bruce, but he’s only met you once.”

“And Bruce’s your twin?”

“Yeah.”

“Does he play big brother or do you?”

He doesn’t startle, he shrugs. “Dunno. Me, I guess.”

There’s warmth there. There’s an overprotective streak, one that makes her think that he might talk to him in the halls, in front of everyone, so people don’t try and screw with him- when Pepper met Bruce, he had struck her as someone who kids would pick on without thinking about it. Smart, small, and a generally nice guy.

In other words, a pushover punching bag who does your homework for you if you hold his head under the water long enough.

Also stinking drunk, but she was shoving that aside for the moment.

“Any other siblings?”

“No.”

Pepper nods. She should probably stop- she always gets a crick in her neck after too many sessions at once. “Who drove you here today, Clint?”

 “My mom.”

“And she’s the one who signed you up to these sessions?”

“I guess.”

“And your dad?”

There’s something there- he’s displayed uneasy signs about all his family members so far, but it’s the mention of his dad that gets the self-conscious glance downwards that he tries to counteract by not glancing away when he looks up again.

He’s looking for a fight. He might as well be peeling his lips back to show his teeth. “What about him?”

“How does he feel about these sessions?”

Another shrug. “I don’t know? We didn’t really talk about it.”

She says, “Tell me about your school life.”

The shrug wears at the jacket, worries it around the edges, and he’s shrinking inside it without even realizing. “What about it?”

“Who do you spend your time with? And don’t say Tony and the others, because I know you don’t.”

There’s less fight in him this time- he almost wilts, his shoulders sagging slightly. But then it’s back up, his eyes steeling again, and Pepper wonders why the hell he puts himself through this crap.

He maintains eye contact as he says, “I hang out with my group, mostly. The Meats.”

In a spectacular effort of poise and grace, she holds in her laugh. “The Meats. Right. And you like them?”

Shrug. “Some of them are okay.”

And oh, Pepper could get an A plus and a gold star for analysing that answer if she wanted to.

“How so?”

She’s expecting a scowl. Actually, no she’s not- defiance, yes. Suspicion, yes. Anger, not so much. Anger isn’t a big factor for this kid. It’s there, of course, but it’s an underlayer, eclipsed by everything else.

She’s had a lot of angry ones come to her- anger she can handle, anger she knows how to calm down and put dents in the armour until something else gets through. And then there have been the ones who have been nothing _but_ anger- whirlwinds of it, screaming and boiling and throwing her own stapler at her head, so lost in rage that they can’t remember how to do anything else.

But Clint isn’t so much angry as he is irreversibly sad while trying desperately to be angry.

Because angry, see, angry flares: it burns bright and either fades fast or stays and sparks, but most of the time it’s better than the slow decimation of being stupidly, irrationally sad all the time.

So he deflects. He turns things over on themselves and shrugs and meets her gaze like he’s a bullfighter and she’s teasing the red flag in front of the gate.

He doesn’t scowl, and he doesn’t look away. “What do you mean?”

“What do you like about them? Why do you stay with them even though it’s obviously making you miserable?”

“Some of them are okay,” he says after a few seconds, his expression twisting like he’s just eaten something foul. “Most of them are- they- some of them, they’re just doing what’s expected of them. They don’t actually… do stuff to anyone.”

“And why do you stay?”

She’s heard it said hundreds of times before. In high school, she said it to herself when she was in the bathroom and trying to stop her fingers shaking long enough to light a cigarette.

So it might twinge a bit when Clint looks at her with those big, pleading eyes, and says, “Better than nothing.”

“But you have other people. Tony, and Darcy, and your brother. You have more than you think, Clint.”

He’s quiet for a while. She thinks he’s quiet a lot of the time when he lets himself be.

“It’s just for another year,” he says, and his voice is heavy.

Pepper says, “And then what?”

His throat works. The bruise is cast into a worse light in this room- dark and daunting and shameful, like something in the back of the shelves that you cover with whatever you can.

He finally drops his eyes, and his fists are still clenched in his pockets. “Dunno.”

“Okay,” Pepper says.

There’s a silence where Clint stares at his shoes and Pepper thinks about how the carpet is going to have mud matted in it for the next few days, judging by the dirt caked around the edges of his shoes.

Sometimes, Pepper wonders how they get like this- all broken glass pressing on their insides, all pins and needles in their mouth, all closing their hands on whatever they can find as long as it sticks around.

She used to wonder how she got like this, and the answer came just as fast- it just happened. Day by day, shard by shard, and then one day, she turned into whatever she is now. She slipped.

There’s a shift of movement when Clint looks over at the clock, and his eyes come back to his shoes for a second before Pepper says, “I get it, by the way.”

Clint doesn’t look up this time. “Get what?”

“Why you do it.”

Clint snorts- finally, a response, praise the lord- and Pepper runs with it.

“I get it,” she says. “I think it’s stupid, but I get it. Looking for home in all the wrong people.”

Clint’s eyes are still on his laces, but it’s obvious his heart isn’t in it.

“It’s comfortable and you don’t want to disturb the herd, or whatever.” Pepper, for all her essays and all her dictionary-reading from when she was bored and slightly high in freshman year, can’t string her thoughts together for shit.

“I think,” she says, and doesn’t know how the hell to continue. Her mouth opens, and she tries to form it like she would on paper, one pencil-scratch after the other, drowned out by whatever’s on the radio that day- “I think you’re sixteen, and you’re confused, and you fit into any skin that’s warm. I get it. We all did it in high school. Especially now with hair dye available in every store anyone goes to, ever.”

She swallows, her throat suddenly feeling too thick. “Which you’ll definitely regret, if you were considering it. Seriously, I’m warning you now, there may not be anything that screams ‘rebellious’ more than a green mohawk, but you know what else a green mohawk screams? Unemployment. No dipshit is ever going to hire the jackass with the green mohawk, take it from my personal experience.”

Clint looks surprised by the huff of laughter that bubbles up, but Pepper was expecting it, because come on, she’s hilarious on a bad day and hysterical on good ones.

“Uh,” Clint says. “Right.”

“Right,” Pepper says, and pretends not to see the cautious smile that makes its way up Clint’s mouth.

 

It doesn’t take long after that- half an hour of small talk and efforts not to make his walls slam up again, and Pepper doesn’t really get anywhere but she doesn’t think it matters for today.

When Clint reaches for his bag, he pauses.

“No offence,” he says, and looks at her. “But you’re definitely one of Tony’s people.”

“As are you,” Pepper replies, oddly pleased.

Clint nods quickly, picking up his bag. “Even if you are, like, thirty.”

“All respect lost for you, Jesus Christ, don’t even,” Pepper says before she manages to stop herself, and thinks she’s fucked it up for a second.

But Clint just smiles- that same smile, the careful one, like he doesn’t know if he’s letting himself do it or not.

“See you next week, I guess.”

“Bloody right I will,” Pepper says, and Clint almost looks surprised as he makes for the door.

When it’s almost closed behind him, she remembers. “Oh, wait!”

The door jerks open again, and Clint’s upper half leans through.

Pepper holds out her fist, pinkie out, and it takes a second for it to click for Clint.

“No thanks,” he says curtly, but he’s still smiling. “He does that with you too, huh?”

“Abandonment and negligence issues,” Pepper says, straight-faced. “Got to love them. Leaves everyone with all sorts of delicious issues. Tony copes with it via slutting around and varying between no physical contact and way too much. Including pinkies. I could go into more depth, but whatever. And if you tell him I said that, I’m saying you’re unstable and there’s nothing you can do about it, because I’m legally old enough to rent a car and you’re not. So, no pinkies?”

Clint is blinking, his mouth making aborted little movements outwards. “No pinkies. Are you always like this when you’re off the clock?”

“It’s a distinct possibility,” Pepper says, quoting Tony. “I’ll see you next week, Clint.”

“See you next week, Miss.”

 

 


	11. Chapter 11

Bruce is watching Darcy’s red nails as they drum in sequence on her napkin, which has sets of lip-prints all over it, but looks away when she notices.

Clint catches it and raises his eyebrows at him from across the table, smiling smugly, and if Bruce was a worse person than he is, he would point towards Natasha as retribution. But because he’s decent and kind and not a complete jackass, he just smiles back tightly and avoids both his brother’s and Darcy’s eyes.

A customer thanks Natasha for the coffee as she leaves, and then the door is closing behind her and Natasha reaches up to undo her apron. “I’m out. Steve, your turn.”

Steve doesn’t look up from the chair beside Bruce’s, where he’s bent over a maths sheet and scribbling furiously. “Almost finished. We’re closing soon, anyway.”

“That’s not the point! You’ve done, like, five minutes of actual work today.”

Steve turns in his chair to give her a dry look, and she blanches. “Okay, you’ve done _some_ work. But you’ve spent the last two hours at that table with everyone, and my feet hurt. We’re switching. Get your ass behind this counter.”

“No-one’s here,” Darcy points out, and leaves another lipstick mark on the rim of her coffee cup as she takes a sip. “Sit the fuck down. Make Steve get up if someone comes in.”

“Thank you, Darcy,” Steve says, half absent and half sarcastic, and only glances up when a chair scrapes as Clint pulls it out.

Natasha has the apron bundled in her fist as she sits down, green and smeared with coffee grinds. She smiles too widely at Clint, parts of what’s left of her hair falling into her eyes, and says, “Thanks.”

Bruce watches the uncertain twitch of Clint’s mouth as he says, “No problem,” and wonders why those two even broke up in the first place.

Probably the same reason Tony and Steve haven’t gotten over themselves and made out, or why Jessica from Biology class and Carol from art class haven’t broken up, or why Bruce hasn’t made a move on Darcy: they can’t figure out if that particular lurch in their stomach is good or not.

Or, well, Bruce can’t figure that out about Darcy, but he’s almost entirely sure that her stomach is completely butterfly-free when it comes to him. Which is a hard pill to swallow, but it’s still a familiar clench in his throat as he does.

He looks over at Darcy and says, “Hey, why are you here, anyway?”

And at the surprised-pseudo-amused look she gives him: “Not that I mind you being here, I- it’s just you’re not usually here, so I th-”

“Tony is at his therapist’s house,” Darcy says, her fingers tap-tap-tapping. “Again. Which personally I find fucking creepy.”

“Lovely,” Clint says. “So you’re just settling for us?”

She rocks sideways, her shoulder butting against his. “Ha-ha-fuckedy-ha. Shut up.”

Natasha frowns. “Why is Tony at his therapist’s house?”

Everyone turns to her, like, ‘ _you didn’t know_?’ before Bruce remembers that Natasha doesn’t really hang out with any of them, least of all Tony, so there’s no reason why she would be in the know about Pepper.

“Um,” Natasha says, pushing her dangerously bleached fringe back. “I’m pretty sure that’s statutory rape?”

Steve’s pencil is still tight in his hand as he blurts, “No, it’s not like _that_ ,” and Darcy starts snorting uncontrollably into her coffee.

“They have an unusual therapist-patient relationship,” Darcy explains, still laughing. “Which mostly consists of him going around to her house and eating takeout. And watching bad movies. Fucking creepy.”

Understandably, Natasha just looks at her, incredulous, which had been Bruce’s reaction last year. “So… they just hang out.”

“Basically. They used to have actual sessions when he was younger, but they got over it.”

Natasha continues to stare. “They _seriously_ just hang out? Like, there’s nothing going on?”

“Zilch,” Darcy says, her nail slicing partly into the rim of the Styrofoam of her cup. “Tony is horrible at keeping secrets, he would’ve told me years ago. Still fucking creepy, right?”

“Fucking creepy,” Natasha agrees, her fingers flexing around her apron.

When Bruce had found out- ‘found out’ being the loose term, because he had ‘found out’ via Tony mentioning it in passing and having Clint explain it to him at home later- he had been just as confused, because that didn’t _happen_. There were teacher-student romances, so he had figured there must be therapist-patient romances as well, but not therapist-and-patient-spending-time-together-just-because-they-want-to’s.

He hadn’t understood it for a while, until he had tried to ask Tony about it when they were paired together during Biology class a few months ago.

He had opened his mouth, thinking about asking _hey, no offence, but why do you hang out with your therapist_ , when he had thought, _why do you hang out with me, actually_?

Then Bruce had thought about why he hung out with Steve, or Natasha, and why anyone hung out with anyone, ever. And even at that point, he had known there are different types of friendships- ones out of convenience, ones because there’s no-one else, ones out of boredom, ones because they need something from the other person, ones because they have something in common, ones to get back at someone- it goes on.

And he had realized that it could have been any one of those, or one he hadn’t even thought of. And then he had thought, with Tony’s pencil in one hand and a test tube in the other, in the overstuffed classroom with not enough chairs and too many people, that obviously adults get lonely, too.

Not that Pepper is like any adult he knows, but whatever.

Natasha asks, “How old is she?”

“Late twenties-ish,” Clint says. His jacket is slung over the back of his chair, the sleeves of it dangling over the ground. “I think she’s okay.”

“Well, yeah, she’s okay, but it’s still creepy.” Darcy tilts her head into her hand, towards Clint. “How was your session with her?”

Bruce catches the questioning look between Steve and Natasha, but it’s gone just as fast.

“Fine,” Clint answers, short and jerky and with a distinct air of ‘shut the hell up about it,’ and Bruce tries not to think about how often he’s been talking like that lately.

 

Bruce likes Pepper. Or what he remembers of her, anyway- he’s only met her once, when he was tipsy and then rapidly snowballing to being so drunk he couldn’t stand up without the room crashing sideways.

He remembers somehow getting up to Pepper’s office with Darcy and Tony in tow, and falling over both of their laps when they sat on the couch.

They had sprawled over each other for half an hour, drinking steadily, with Pepper sitting on top of her desk, until Darcy had almost thrown up and Tony had fallen off the couch laughing about it. After that, Pepper had made them all stumble out to her car and told them that if any of them threw up in her car, she would sue them. Or declare them mentally unstable. Or both.

She had dropped Tony off first, then Darcy, and then it was just her and Bruce, who had been fiddling with the rear-view mirror and grinning lazily at nothing.

“So,” Pepper had said, after she had made him stop screwing with the rear view mirror so they wouldn’t crash and die. “What do you want to do when you grow up?”

Bruce had shoved a hand across his face, smearing his mouth sideways before saying, “Steve wants to be a fireman. Which is stupid. And Darcy wants to be a journalist. And Clint jokes about being a shop clerk, but he really wants to be a chef.”

“Uh-huh,” Pepper had said, turning a corner too sharply so Bruce had slid sideways, his cheek pressing up against the window. “And that’s lovely, but I asked about what _you_ wanted to do.”

Bruce had frowned, the glass dragging on his mouth. “Good question. Ask me again when I can pass a breathalyzer test without getting arrested.”

Pepper had laughed, short and loud. “Fair enough.”

Bruce had closed his eyes for a few minutes, thinking about what he wanted to do and how much he didn’t want to do anything, really, and how hard he had failed test for his learner’s licence as Pepper twisted the steering wheel.

“Hey,” Bruce had said, trying to move his head the absolute minimal amount he possibly could while propped up on the window. “When did you first realize you were an adult?”

She hadn’t said anything, and for a minute Bruce had thought she hadn’t heard him, but then she had said, “You know how there’s the primary school, the middle school and the high school, like, three blocks apart from each other?”

Bruce had nodded.

“Yeah,” Pepper had said, not looking at him, still concentrating on the road even though they had been stopped at a red light. “I have to drive past those to get to and back from work, and last year I got to go home early because my client cancelled. School had just got out, it was absolutely pissing down rain and I could barely see out the windshield.”

She had paused to change gears, and still didn’t look at him while she did it. “And I was driving past the primary school, and literally every second kid had an umbrella. Every one and a half kid, even. And shut up, you’re drunk so that should make sense.”

Bruce had grunted, and had watched Pepper’s smile twitch.

“Anyway, almost everyone had an umbrella and a parent holding it over their heads as they ran to their cars, or over each other’s head as they walked home, or whatever. And I didn’t think anything of it before I drove past the middle school, and only half of them had umbrellas, and the rest of them were just making a break for it. Maybe a dozen of them had their parents with them. And then I drove past the high school, and the gutters were flooding over, and next to none of them had umbrellas. None of them had parents with them, and everyone was covering their heads and running for the bus. And there I was, in a car, because apparently I wasn’t them anymore and I didn’t have to run through the rain, or hold umbrellas over people’s heads, or vice versa. Or something. And it was an embarrassingly stupid revelation, and I felt stupid while having it, and I’m counting on you to take this very seriously and find it hauntingly meaningful because you’re at that point where you’re going to get home and spend an hour or so bent over your toilet bowl. Good luck with that, by the way.”

Bruce hadn’t found it hauntingly meaningful, but it had hit somewhere down by his stomach and stayed there.

The rest of the drive had been silent, except for Bruce giving directions- mostly correct ones, even- until Pepper had pulled up outside his house and, like always, Bruce hadn’t wanted to go in.

He had opened the car door slowly, trying to wobble as soberly as he could, but before he had closed it behind him, he had bent back. “Hey, Pepper?”

She had been reaching for the radio, and the streetlights had been reflecting in her eyes, he remembers that vividly: paper-yellow light mixing with the usual brown, and her hand had stilled on the dial. “Yes?”

A pause, and Bruce had almost forgotten what he had wanted to ask, because the whiskey had been really hitting his head- his feet had looked too far away on the sidewalk.

He had swallowed thickly, watching the yellow lights span in Pepper’s blue eyes and thinking of a sea of umbrellas, of kids taking shelter under them and everyone else getting drenched.

“Did you want to be a therapist when you grew up?”

And she had laughed, finally meeting his gaze with her mouth stretched like she meant it.

“Who the hell,” she had said, “wants to grow up to be a therapist?”

 

Only two other customers come in in the next half an hour, and Steve serves them both with a hurried smile and an extra dollop of whipped cream, but apart from that they all sit around the table drinking too much coffee for this time in the evening and playing Secrets.

Secrets is something that everyone had started playing at about the same time people started playing Truth or Dare- basically, everyone tries to top the previous person’s secret. It keeps going until someone says something so outrageous that no-one has anything to top it, and most of the time people win by lying through their teeth.

At this point, Darcy has drunk enough coffee to ensure that she’ll still be awake by this time tomorrow, and lipstick marks litter the rim of her cup until she’s not wearing it anymore and the cup comes away clean.

She takes a long sip, her fingers are shaking; her eyes bright. She says, “I’ve gotten off in three public bathrooms on four separate occasions.”

Clint outright _howls_ , his shoulders shaking, too light without their usual leather weighing them down, and they all glance towards him because it’s getting rarer to see him like this nowadays, especially with his eye half-swollen shut like it is now.

Steve’s cheeks dimple. “I didn’t think we had more than three public bathrooms in this town, but I’ll take your word for it.”

“Well, they do,” Darcy says. “The one near Bleaker’s shops, the one down by the beach, the bathroom near science block-”

“Oh, god,” Bruce chokes, and his laugh is creasing everything in her face- his eyes, his mouth, his forehead. He puts a hand over his eyes, pressing down. “Not at _school_ , you can’t _masturbate_ at _school_.”

“I’m all about fucking with society’s opinions,” Darcy says airily. “Such as the ludicrous notion that one cannot masturbate in school. Shit, I sound like Tony. Also, I fucking hate that word.”

“What word?”

“ _’Masturbate_ ,’” Darcy says, her nose wrinkling. “It sounds- I don’t even fucking know. Slippery? No, that doesn’t sit right. It sounds like… like, sort of grimy. Or slimy. I don’t know, it- it makes me think of someone jerking off in a medical lab, or something.”

Natasha smiles, chinning herself on her hand. “Tony would love this. Sitting around a table discussing the imagery of the word ‘masturbate.’ He’ll kick himself when he finds out he missed this.”

Bruce doesn’t know how she knows this- as far as he’s seen, she’s only talked to Tony twice, let alone had an actual conversation. Then again, it doesn’t take much time knowing Tony to realize that he’s the kind of person that would enjoy collectively and extensively discussing the imagery of the word ‘masturbate.’

Then he’s being nudged in the shoulder by Clint, who is standing up, pushing his chair back. “Hey, we should get going. You know how mom gets.”

“Yeah,” Bruce says absently, and is standing up with him when Steve says, “But you haven’t had your turn yet!”

Bruce wets his lips, and almost chickens out. Instead, he looks straight at Steve and says, “I don’t have a gag reflex, and no, I didn’t find that out via blowjob.”

Darcy slaps a hand over her mouth so she doesn’t spit out her coffee as she laughs, and Bruce tries not to smile too hard at that.

“See you guys tomorrow,” he says, and falls in step beside Clint as they walk out.

 

The way Bruce had seen it, his twin brother becoming ‘Beef’ hadn’t been planned. It had just been a thing that he had fallen into, and even after three years of it, Bruce still sometimes expected Clint to walk down the halls with his hair shucked up like it used to be, with one of his old t-shirts that he had thrown out in freshman year because they had looked ‘too girly,’ which Bruce still doesn’t get.

It scares him, sometimes- how heavy the jacket had suddenly become on his brother’s shoulders. How he had just picked it up out of one of the boxes in the garage day and shrugged it on like it didn’t mean anything, because at that point, it hadn’t. It had eclipsed him, almost falling to his knees, and every time Bruce sees a flash of it in the halls, he always thinks of the goofy smile on Clint’s face when he had put it on for the first time.

 _What do you think_ , he had asked.

Bruce had barely glanced up before going back to shuffling through the box of stationary he was looking through. _It’s about three sizes too big for you, Clint. Put it back_.

Clint had twisted sideways to see himself in the mirror, and had said, almost thoughtfully _: I don’t know, I kinda like it._

Three years and too many bloody knuckles and Bruce still really, really doesn’t agree with him- there’s scuffing along the sleeves like someone with claws had picked at it; there are burns lining the inside, and all in all, it’s always going to be too big for him.

There are times when Bruce thinks that’s all Clint’s trying to do with his life: fit into that damn jacket.

And lately, when he’s spotted Clint out behind the field holding a cigarette, or shoving some poor kid up against the wall, or even just leaning back as he walks down the halls, because he’s Beef and therefore untouchable, he keeps thinking about a poem by some next to unknown guy named Jamie T. Halferson that he got assigned to study in English last year.

He doesn’t remember most of it, because it had gone on for around about three pages (single-spaced, and that wasn’t anything compared to ‘Howl,’ but it still too long, anyway) and he only found a few lines of it to be particularly memorable. It had gone on about strays and shadows and reflections and too many things for a bored sophomore to actually absorb.

But the gist of it was that through trying to latch onto someone, trying to create ourselves through different people and turn yourself into a different person, that everyone was layered by their own solidified shadows: shadow upon shadow upon shadow until you got something that you could touch without your hand going through it.

And Bruce just kept thinking: what if Clint was the shadow and Beef was the outcome of it- the shadow, solidified? What if the big, black, burned jacket, over the years, had become more substantial than the boy inside it?

The teacher, Miss Hollister, had had perpetually wide eyes and yellow fingers from too many hand-rolled cigarettes that she always smoked during break when she thought no-one could see her, and in every lesson, she had started to talk about stray dogs.

Strays dogs and how they tried to cling, that it was their basic biological instinct, but flinched away and bared their teeth when someone tried to clean them up or get some food into them.

The poem goes on for a while, line after line of shit about strays and shadows that Bruce forgot right after he aced the paper on it, but during one of the classes on it, he had been falling asleep on his arms, and their teacher had said something that had caught him just as he was blinking himself awake.

“And for want of human contact,” she had said, “we are accidentally and inevitably horribly lonely bastards.”

Bruce still doesn’t know if she was reading something out loud, or stating a fact.


	12. Chapter 12

Tony wakes up with a surprising lack of a splitting headache.

He lies still for a second, just in case his hangover is luring him into a false sense of security before slamming up at him all at once, but nothing happens.

When he finally sits up, he doesn’t want to curl up in a ball and die, which is another welcome change to most mornings he’s been having for the past few weeks.

It’s then when he remembers- Pepper had been drinking pointedly for about an hour before he had taken the bus home, and she had held it over his head so he couldn’t reach it even if he jumped, because Pepper is practically a giraffe, and that’s not counting her high heels.

She had been laughing steadily into the floor when he had left, a bottle cradled close to her chest, and he grins to himself as he reaches for his phone.

It rings eight times before it clicks, and Tony says cheerfully, “Having a good morning, are we?”

“Burn in _hell_ ,” comes Pepper’s croaky reply, and he hears her fumble for something that’s probably the radio.

“Love you, too.”

The usual morning music from the radio is tinny through the phone- some old jazz music that Tony’s never heard of and doesn’t particularly want to.

“Get ready for school,” Pepper says, more of a mumble than anything. “Go. Learn things. I’m going to pass out in the shower. Bye.”

“Drink lots of water,” Tony says just before the dial tone, and remembers her telling him the exact same thing when he was fourteen and making his way through his first bottle of vodka, which had tasted terrible and had left him with what seems like a permanent and irrational hatred for it.

He looks as the clock as he slides his phone on top of it, and decides that it’s going to be a fucking spectacular morning, purely because he has waffles in cupboard (courtesy of Darcy, who likes to actually have breakfast available), he has an hour to waste, he can actually turn on the lights without shoving an arm over his eyes, and he’s alone in his house for the first time in weeks.

Not that he doesn’t like it when Darcy and/or Clint stay over, but some mornings, he just wants to walk naked to the shower without having pillows thrown at him from either the pull-out couch, the air mattress or both.

And _showers_ , for another thing. For a while now, he’s been having showers at night, around eleven-ish, and a majority of them had been while incredibly drunk and he usually ended up knocked off a whole shelf of shampoo bottles, conditioner bottles and the like. Either that, or he had passed out and didn’t have time for a shower the next morning, and had just hoped no-one would notice that his hair was slowly getting so greasy that he had stopped touching during class it in fear of getting oily fingerprints on his textbook.

It had only happed once or twice- the extreme grease thing, that is- but it still made Tony shudder to think about it.

He strips out of his tank top and sweatpants as he makes his way to the kitchen, leaving them puddled on the floor behind him, until he’s down to his boxers.

Clicking the coffeemaker on, he reaches over to the cupboard and shells out two waffles, slotting them into the toaster and tipping his head up to send a silent prayer of thanks to Darcy as he does- screw God, because Darcy leaves assorted perishables for him.

The coffee is ready first, and Tony drinks down a cup of it without taking a breath, his tongue sorely regretting it when he comes back up, gulping air just as the toaster dings and the waffles shoot up in a way that still slightly terrifies him even after four years of listening to it.

He eats them dry, scattering crumbs over the kitchen floor that he thinks briefly about cleaning up at some point in the weekend, and makes for the shower.

It is, overall, the most coherent shower he’s had in a long time. He doesn’t trip over anything, he doesn’t bang his head on the sink, and he doesn’t have to clumsily scrub vomit off the tiles- instead, he washes his hair, shaves his face around the bruises, and then spends twenty minutes standing in the spray, thinking about nothing with his eyes closed and his forehead pressing against the screen door.

His dad’s paying the water bill, anyway.

When he steps out, his fingers are wrinkled from the water in a way that he hasn’t seen in a long time, and he dries his hair with a towel as he walks back to his bedroom for his clothes.

He pulls on some jeans that he’s only worn twice before due to the jagged hole they have in one of the knees- some people say they’re fashion statements, Tony says it’s time to buy new jeans- and a dark green button-down that spills over his collarbones and apparently set off his eyes, according to Darcy’s mother.

He bends to go through the pockets of the jeans he had worn yesterday (blessedly hole-free, but in need of a wash) and pulls out a carton of cigarettes. There’s only one left, and he fits it between his lips as he finds his lighter wedged in at the bottom of the pockets of his backpack, and flicks it on under the tip of the cigarette, breathing in.

On the desk, his phone vibrates, and he bends back to grab it.

 

**To: Tony**

**From: Clint**

_Not allowed the car today. Sorry_.

 

He stares at it for a while, something bitter like a bad taste in his mouth, and catches himself thinking why he had expected anything else.

 

There’s a different clerk in the corner shop, but she doesn’t ask for ID and instead slides the pack of cigarettes towards Tony with a bored, “That’ll be four bucks.”

Tony smokes all the way to the bus stop, hunching into his jersey and cupping his hands around the cigarette to protect it from the rain, which isn’t strong, but the wind has picked up again.

His split lip is mostly healed at this point- he can’t taste dried blood anymore when he runs his tongue over it. There’s a small scab, but nothing else.

The bus is early today, so Tony only has to wait a few minutes accidentally burning his fingers and getting steadily soaked everywhere else, all the while wishing he had brought the umbrella that Pepper had told him to buy last year in the rainfall week.

The bus driver glares in a way that makes him think of the word ‘Mordor,’ even though Tony has never read Tolkien or watched more than ten minutes of any Lord of the Rings movie, and he grins around the cigarette before taking it out of his mouth and letting it drop into the gutter as he steps into the bus.

He takes the aisle seat, dropping his bag beside him on the seat and trying to shake the water out of his hair, without success.

Darcy gets on at the stop outside her house, dripping all the way down the aisle and sitting down in the empty spot where Tony’s bag had been a second ago.

“Fucking rain,” she says, and she’s shivering through her thin jacket that she’s pulling tight around her torso. There’s something off about how she’s leaning forwards, like she’s bracing herself against the seat in front of her.

Tony can feel his bag leaking water over his shoes. “You know what would help with the whole ‘warmth’ thing? Pants. Wear pants. Pants are good. Pants are novel, even. Everyone thinks you’re in with the cheerleaders with the lack of things you wear.”

He means it as a joke, smiling while he says it, but her lips thin and she looks down at her bare knees, just below the lace, where her dress cuts off. Water is skating down her legs, and her eyes keep tracking it, and Tony thinks she’s doing it just so she doesn’t have to look at him.

“Sorry,” he says, and it sounds familiarly pathetic even to his own ears: the sagging, sodden weight of it like a ball of paper at the back of his throat. “It was a joke. Because I’m hilarious, as always. Ha, ha.”

“It’s fine.” She looks up, and there’s a smear of red where if shouldn’t be, under the line of her lips. She’s not smiling. “I was just despairing for you because you used the word ‘novel’ as an adjective again.”

It catches Tony off guard, and he smirks without meaning to.

“Bloody Americans,” he says, mostly just to bait her. If she’s pissed with him- well, if she’s pissed to the point where he should be worried- she won’t say what she usually does, but:

“British fuckers,” she replies, falling into their usual routine, and Tony’s breathing eases slightly.

But even through the relief, Tony knows he’s going to be sidestepping this the entire day- judging the gravity of her smile, how her laugh isn’t going to pick up like it usually does. She’s going to swear like a sailor today, he can tell. More than she usually does, at least.

She moves her hands like she’s going to pull the hem of her dress down, or the neck of it up, but they waver for a second and instead come to bunch at her knees.

She looks away again, out the window. “By the way, yesterday we all talked about the imagery of the word ‘masturbate.’”

Tony overdoes the gasp, which, sadly, is actually about 40% genuine. “ _Without_ me?”

“It wasn’t a long conversation,” Darcy says, but her lips are curling upwards. “Come on, you know by now that you’re the only one who can make a conversation about masturbating last for more than five minutes. You’d draw if out for as long as you possibly fucking could. In _length_.”

Tony opens his mouth, and Darcy cuts him off with, “And yes, I noticed that innuendo.”

“Bet you were proud of it.”

“Fucking right I am,” Darcy says, and her smile it getting something behind it, like it’s actually going to keep standing if Tony leaves it there.

He pauses before asking the next question, tempted to sit in comfortable silence for the rest of the bus ride, because that way he can’t screw anything else up.

But then again, he’s always been the one who doesn’t know when to shut up.

“Who’s ‘we?’”

Darcy glances back, and it catches and holds until her gaze is focused on him. Then it goes blurry, off to the side, remembering. “Me, Clint, Steve and Bruce. Shit, and Natasha. We went in for a coffee and got sidetracked.”

Ever since moving to America, Tony has tuned in to any conversation that said the word ‘Steve’ in it, even if they were using it for its usual wording instead of talking about Steve Rogers.

Steve Rogers, who works in a coffeeshop, who has freckles in odd places, who has skinny wrists but big hands and wears terrible checkered pants and has had a solid grip on Tony for longer than he cares to remember.

It’s like this:

You know when you’re walking past two people talking, or a TV, and someone- a news reporter, a guy with hair that sticks up around his ears, your teacher, one of your parents- says your name while talking to someone else, and you automatically zone in without it even registering, because it’s _your_ name and it’s hardwired into you?

That’s what it’s like when someone says ‘Steve.'

And it’s not Tony’s name, the word ‘Steve’ isn’t not his by any means or standards, so he really shouldn’t be glancing over his shoulder at it. He shouldn’t be chasing Steve, but he does, every time.

Tony says, “You-” but stops when the bus does, and then the doors are opening and a dripping Clint and Bruce are getting on the bus, Clint first and then Bruce behind him.

Clint’s bruise is more swollen than ever, an angry purple over his grey eyes, and he, Darcy and Tony carefully don’t acknowledge each other, because there are a few of the Meat pack at the back of the bus.

Bruce nods at the both of them, dropping his eyes when they graze Darcy, and sits down two seats in front of them.

“Speak of the devil,” Darcy says quietly, before adding, “Devil _s_.”

Tony doesn’t look behind him, but he can hear Beef and his cohorts-slash-cronies-slash-flying-monkey-sidekicks start talking loudly about the rainfall party tonight, and if it’s going to be on, and how ‘off the hook’ it’s going to be, and how they’re going to ‘dog so many chicks, and you know they want me.’

Darcy nudges him, her head pressing into the seat. “Is Clint still pissed at you?”

He shrugs, suddenly irrationally tired even though he had gotten at least seven hours of sleep last night, and thinks about how he had thought it was going to be a good morning less than half an hour ago.

He leans forwards so his forehead is pushing into the seat, right next to Darcy’s, and it takes some of the non-existent weight off of his shoulders.

“It’s a distinct possibility,” he says under his breath, and remembers saying it to Pepper, and that again, it was about Clint. The phone had been pressing into his chin and his sleeve had been dragging through a packet of tomato sauce, but he hadn’t noticed at the time.

Darcy nods, her wet hair dragging. “You could text him.”

Tony starts to say _, I’m not going to text him when he’s literally five meters away from me, I can talk to him later,_ when he remembers that talking involves having to actually confront someone face to face, and he’s royally crap at it and will probably end up offending him or worse.

“I could,” he admits, and raises his head enough to see the mess of Bruce’s hair over the seat, almost an arm’s reach away. “Or I could get Bruce to talk to him for me.”

Darcy pushes him with her shoulder, her hair matting against the ratty material of the seat. “Pussy.”

“If you’re meaning that as an insult, I find that to be an oxymoron,” Tony says, and has to lower his voice. “I’ll have you know that the female genitalia can take a hell of a lot. Things going into them, considerably larger things coming out of them, like, say, babies’ heads- and the rest of them, of course, they won’t be, like, disembodied baby heads coming out of a random woman’s vagina- well, obviously there has to be a case like that, but in general, it’s not-”

“Oh my fucking _god_ ,” Darcy whispers, and she starts to laugh, her shoulder shaking quietly, her head still pressing into the seat. “Tony, I can tell you right now that I know a shitload more about-”

She stops, her mouth twisting in amusement. “- _female genitalia_ than you do.”

“I’ll take your word for it,” Tony says, and, looking up, he sees a glimpse of Bruce’s mouth twitching, having overheard some of the ‘female genitalia’ rant. Not only that, but he’s looking at Darcy with an expression that Tony has seen once too often when Bruce looks at Darcy.

Bruce starts to stare down at his shoes when he notices Tony caught it, and the entire time, Darcy has been stifling laughter into her hand, looking over at Tony.

The loudest thing on this bus, apart from the rumble of the shitty engine, is the Meats in the back, who are now close to yelling; laughing and shoving at each other’s shoulders and holding the cigarettes that they won’t dare to smoke on the bus, because the driver slapped one of them for it last month and now they’re kind of terrified of her.

Tony knows what Clint’s- Beef’s- expression is like without even having to look, and Bruce’s face is pinched as he pointedly doesn’t look back to either Darcy or his brother.

Again, Tony looks at Darcy and considers not saying it. He considers shutting up and sitting back and ‘keeping his nose out of things,’ like his dad used to say, before mum left and before he started thinking of her as ‘mom’ instead, after three years of living in America.

He still remembers the first time- the leaves had started to rust over, the autumn setting in like it never really used to in his old house, and he had thought _, I wonder if mom liked autumn_ , because he had never really asked. He hadn’t realized he had thought ‘mom’ until a few hours later, and by then, he had already glossed over it.

 _Shut up_ , he tells himself. _Let it go. Just ignore it_.

He doesn’t have to lower his voice much so he isn’t heard when he tilts his head towards Darcy and tells her, without meeting her eyes, “You know Bruce has had a huge, raging, cringingly embarrassing crush on you since the end of last year, right?”

Darcy’s smile flickers and dies for the second time in ten minutes, and wow, Tony just loves kicking puppies today, huh?

“I know,” she says, and it’s not stiff. It’s sort of- hesitant, which Tony hadn’t expected. “I mean, yeah, I know, and fuck, it’s- it’s _Bruce_ , he’s not that good at hiding shit like this.”

She wets her lips. “But we barely hang out, and I honestly don’t think we’ve ever hung out one on one, and I thought- you know how guys are, I thought it’d go away after a while. I’m still expecting it to. He’ll get over it. He _better_ get over it.”

Tony watches the inverted wince, like she regretted saying that last part.

“He’s a nice guy,” she admits softly after a few more seconds. “But I don’t like him like that. And I’m still not gay, no matter how much I’d like to be, although I’ve been considering telling him that I am just to help speed up the ‘him-getting-over-me’ process, because he’s _nice_ , and I don’t want-”

It hangs there for a while, unfinished, and for a minute Tony thinks she’s just going to leave it there.

“It’s not a big deal,” she says, like she’s letting something unclench.

Tony can’t count how many times he’s said that to Pepper, to Clint, to himself, to whoever he can get to listen to him.

“It’s not a big deal,” Darcy says again.

She swallows, and Tony thinks for about the thirty-first time in his life that people’s eyes shouldn’t look this heavy when they’re this young.

Sixteen, he has repeatedly realized, is still a child. Sixteen is still blundering around with fuck all life experience and a know-it-all attitude and pretending you understand what everyone is talking about.

 _I don’t know_ , Pepper had told him once. _I think some sixteen year olds understand more about all of this than most thirty year olds_.

Tony had asked, _understand all of what?_

Pepper had just glanced at him, and this time it had taken her a while to answer. _I don’t know_ , she had said again. _All of it._

Then she had smiled, but not that I-know-more-than-you-could-ever-hope-to smile that Tony has seen adults do, and Tony had loved her for it. _This, I suppose_ , she had said, and didn’t tell him what ‘this’ was.

Sixteen, he has realized, over and over and over, is bullshit. Sixteen is the age where everything and everyone is in between kicking a ball around a field and kicking the shit out of someone outside a bar, and sixteen is the tangible line between the two where one side is leaning towards the field and one side is leaning towards the bar and then there’s another side doing something else entirely that Tony hasn’t figured out yet.

 _Just give it time_ , he’s heard teachers say, he’s heard parents say, he’s heard the therapists before Pepper say.

 _In a few years_ , they say, with their hands on his shoulder and a less-than-more-than-equal-to-heavy look in their eyes, _none of this will matter_.

Tony looks at Darcy’s heavy eyes and knows that Bruce is drowning in the same weight in front of him, the same as Clint is doing behind him.

He feels the persistent drag of his own eyes and thinks, over and over until it blurs, that it does matter.

That these things matter, that things like being soaked through to the skin on a shitty bus matters, that things like wanting someone who doesn’t want you back matters, things like being deniably in love with a less-than-friend matters, things like not turning your homework in and feeling like shit about it matters.

That all this pointless, shifting shit matters- worrying about turning into an alcoholic or already being there, ditching school and getting your shirt caught on the fence, coming home to an empty house and waking up in one, not having the right shirt to wear, and having someone kick the crap out of you, having a parent leave, and getting punched in the face by one of your maybe-best-friends, because you let him.

Things like this have to matter, because there are times where they don’t have anything else to hold onto; there are times where they don’t have anything but the constant weight and their own hands in their laps.

And he barely understands all of this, but the one thing he does understand, the one thing that claws hand-over-hand into his head before anything else is that it _matters_ , that this all matters, because it has to.

He chins himself on the seat in front of him, looks at the back of Bruce’s scrunched hair.

He closes his eyes and it comes to him hand-over-hand, like a heartbeat.


	13. Chapter 13

Darcy is expecting it when her dad gives her a disapproving look on her way to the stove, and smiles innocently. She uses her knife to push her fried onion half off her plate back onto the cooling pan.

“Fried onions are good for you,” her dad says from the couch, and takes a bite out of his own to prove it, chewing wetly.

Darcy sits down opposite him, curling her feet up so she fit in next to his knees. “Since when?”

“Since always,” he says, still chewing, and swallows. “There are starving African orphans who would murder each other for fried onions.”

“Don’t make me think about starving African orphans killing each other while I’m eating,” Darcy says, popping a chip into her mouth. “Just shut the fuck up and let me eat my nutritious dinner that my darling father made me.”

The swear had slipped out before she could remind herself the usual ‘parent(s) are in the general vicinity and/or earshot, refrain from speaking normally until you leave,’ and at the glare that she gets for it, says, “Yeah, I know, sorry. No foul language.”

She swats herself on the back of her hand with her fork. “Bad Darcy.”

“Use your cutlery on food, not on you,” her dad says, mouth stuffed to the brim with steak. “You’re going to need a full stomach for all that drinking you’re going to do tonight.”

He says it half-joking and half-worrying, and she grins. “I promise not to get too drunk, dad. And if I do, I promise I won’t drive.”

“Not making me worry any less,” he says. “And you don’t have your learner’s yet, so you shouldn’t be driving anyway, especially if you’re intoxicated.”

“In-tock-ated,” Bobby calls from the high chair a few feet away, and his small fists bounce off of the bench.

Darcy sighs. “His fifth ever word, and it’s about his oldest sister getting trashed. You must be so proud. High-five, Bobby.”

She holds out her hand, reaching over the back of the couch, and Bobby swats at her palm a few times before finally getting it.

“Nice,” she says, and settles back down. “But seriously, dad, you have nothing to worry about. You know I’m responsible.”

“I also know you’re sixteen,” her dad says, leaning on the word. “You’re all-” he waves his hand in her direction. “-young and stupid and hormonal and vulnerable and _young_ , did I mention that?”

Darcy raises her eyebrows at him. “Wow, dad. Tell me how you really feel.”

“It’s just-” his hand comes around to scratch at the perpetual shaving scabs on his neck, because he’s too stubborn to buy a new razor more than once every two years. “You know you can- tell me… things? Right? I mean, I’m right here if-”

“You’d be the first person.” Darcy tilts her head, considering. “Actually, that’s a lie and we both know it. I’d tell Tony, and then trail my way through my abundance of friends, and _then_ there’s you.”

He laughs with her, but she can tell that it stung a bit. She wants to take it back, but stops herself just in time, curling her lips under her teeth- her dad’s always been the transparent one out of her parents, rarely saying what he means but letting it seep through anyway.

She knocks his shoulder with her knuckles. “I’m kidding, old buddy, old pal. You’d be first in line, hand to God.”

“That’s a lie and we both know it,” her dad says, and his hand is scratch-scratch-scratching at the scabs, but his smile is gaining on him. “I was serious about getting some food in you, though. Remember to drink lots of water. And seawater doesn’t count.”

“I’m not going swimming, dad.”

“I said that every year, and every year I would come home covered in seaweed. It pays to be prepared.”

Darcy is saying, “You’re a walking cliché, you know that,” when Jane yells something from the hallway.

“Come in here and talk, don’t stand out there and yell,” dad yells from the couch, and Darcy doesn’t point out that he’s being a hypocrite.

Slamming footsteps on the floor, and then Jane is throwing the door open, out of breath, her hair flopping over her forehead. “Darcy, can I have mom’s ring when she dies? It’s pretty.”

Darcy hears her dad snort beside her and says, “Depends. Which ring?”

More footsteps, and then her mom is standing next to Jane in the doorway in a paisley-cream bathrobe that cuts off near her ankles. She holds out her hand, the ring in question around her index finger.

“This one,” she says, smothering a laugh. “It’ll either go to you or your sister, so I told her to ask if you wanted it.”

Darcy frowns. “What if Bobby wants it?”

A few feet to her left, Bobby jiggles his feet, letting out a shrill yell, and they all look over at him.

“Then Bobby can fight the two of you over it,” her mom says. “So, what do you think, Darcy?”

“Hmm?”

“Do you want the ring?”

“What?” Darcy looks down again at the ring that her mom is now stretching out towards her, fluttering her fingers. “Oh. No, I’m good. Wait, then what do I get when you die?”

Beside her, her dad is laughing quietly into his hand, but her mom shrugs.

“I don’t know, what do you want?”

Darcy angles her plate on her lap so it doesn’t spill when she sits up. “The locket that you always have on the mantle. Pretty please?”

“No,” Jane says suddenly, her eyes wide. “I want that! I changed my mind, Darcy can have the ring-”

“I don’t want the ring.”

“But you can have it!”

“Hey,” their mom interrupts, her hand squeezing Jane’s shoulder so she looks up. “How about you figure this out when I die, okay? Or more likely, when you’re bored and I’m not at home and the two of you sneak into my jewellery box.”

Jane says, “Okay,” at the same time Darcy says, “Can’t wait. For the sneaking-in thing, I mean. Not the dying thing.”

Her mom laughs, the deep-seated wrinkles becoming more pronounced as she does. She stoops, pressing a kiss to Jane’s head, which doesn’t take much bending because Jane is growing like a beanstalk. “God, you two are so alike.”

“Ew, mom,” Jane says, scrunching up her nose and looking at Darcy, who lobs a cushion at her and misses, hitting the door frame.

“No throwing things during dinner,” her mom says, and bends to pick up the cushion, as Jane pokes her tongue out at Darcy and goes to sit at her dad’s feet.

Her mom says, “Darcy, I thought you were going to that- party thing?”

Darcy nods, waiting until she swallows her mouthful of chips to say, “I am. Clint and Bruce are picking me up.”

From outside, she hears someone laying on a familiar horn, and she pushes her plate onto the coffee table. “Speak of the devil! Devils. Whatever. See you at…?”

“Eleven,” both her parents say at the same time, and she rolls her eyes, pressing her hand against the coffee table.

“It’s _Friday_. I don’t have to wake up early tomo-”

“Eleven,” they both say again, united and scarily practiced in a way that she’s sure they rehearse in the mirror together when they get some time alone.

Darcy is struck with the memory that she hasn’t been able to shove down, that’s been coming up like bile in the past few months: Lonnie Fallon in all his spikey-haired glory, sitting on the wooden slice of his desk in Psychology class after talking to her about her weekend and saying, “Your family is just too freaking perfect, Jugs.”

It made something itch at the back of her tongue, down her throat. And while looking at her family- her mother who has her hand at her father’s shoulder, who has his foot rucked up on Jane’s knee, who is sitting heavily on the carpet with her fingers curled around Bobby’s high chair- she thinks about closed doors and what happens behind them, and if any family is or ever has been perfect, and something scratches at the back of her throat.

She thinks of the word _normal_ , and then _stable_ , and watches her family and how they’re rooted into the carpet and towards one another, and takes her hand off the coffee table where her dad’s leg is resting against.

She reaches for her jacket- she doesn’t bother with an umbrella, she’s going to get soaked anyway- when her mother is suddenly walking up and fussing at her dress.

“I do wish you wouldn’t have your neckline that low,” her mom says, tugging it upwards, and Darcy spots a grey hair tucked in behind her mother’s ear that wasn’t there the last time she looked.

She bites down on the irritation that always accompanies her mom’s ‘help,’ and pushes her hands away a bit less gently than she should.

She smiles tightly and tries to remember the dictionary definition of ‘resent,’ because she’s been told repeatedly it’s going to go away after she moves out. “Yeah, sorry, mom. See you at eleven.”

“Don’t do anything stupid,” her dad says behind her.

Darcy’s mind is doing weird things at the moment- flipping in on itself, caving sideways in strange places- but she can’t help but smile as she reaches for the door.

She tries to get something together, something that would be passable for the version of herself that she gives her parents, and says, “I’m ashamed you think so little of me, father of mine.”

“Ha, ha,” he says, and gives her a tiny salute from the couch as a goodbye. “I’m serious, Darcybird. And don’t get hypothermia, hospital bills are a bitch to pay.”

Darcy looks at her father and his shaving scabs, at her mother and her worry lines, at her little sister and her baby brother with their sticky fingers, and thinks of the seagulls that used to steal their lunch every day without fail when they went for a holiday in Lawrence.

She thinks back to a guy whose name she can’t remember but was apparently related to, who she had met at a wedding of two people whose names she also can’t remember, one of which she was apparently related to. Her third cousin twice removed- or maybe three times, she doesn’t remember or even care that much- drinking wine from a dirty glass and telling her that your family weren’t the people you were related to. That you could loathe and actively shun every single one of your blood relatives, and still have a family to bitch at during Thanksgiving and hang out your laundry and wake you up at obscene hours of the night to ask you something that neither of you will remember in the morning.

It’s raining when she steps outside, and for a second she wonders why she’s surprised at that.

She says, “Bye,” directing it behind her, and closes the door.

 

The drive there is tense, to say the least. There’s a flimsiness to everything the three of them try to talk about, and Darcy doesn’t know how to casually shove _hey Clint, are you still pissed at Tony for asking a blindingly obvious question and witnessing your sort-of-breakdown that he may or may not have told me about in vivid detail while we were both having a battle with McDonalds straws_ into a conversation.

In the last few minutes of it, Darcy sits back and counts the street signs to the beach.

 

Up until about a year ago-and maybe not even then- everyone used to think that Darcy and Tony would get together.

Throughout the entirety of middle school, they had both had to put up with people singing _‘Tony and Darcy, sitting in a tree, K-I-S-S-I-N-G’_ whenever they walked past together, along with knowing smiles from Darcy’s parents any time that she mentioned that she was going to go somewhere with Tony.

After the initial confusion and vague disgust over the fact that they both felt it would be incestuous, they realized that it would have made sense: they both liked the same things, they could predict each other’s movements before they happened; they fell into step without even trying. They were both loud, overwhelming; they ran too fast for most people to keep up; they brimmed over. They both tried to forget things and remembered them anyway, and most of the time they remembered them more clearly than anyone else did. They were a sure pair, if anything.

Unstoppable force meets immovable object, if you will.

Darcy hadn’t put much thought into it until a few months ago, when they were both lying with their backs pressed into Tony’s bed, too drunk and too dizzy to do anything else.

Tony had been waiting for his head to stop spinning; one hand loose around a bottle of wine that had to be at least half backwash by then.

Darcy had been blinking rapidly, making shapes out of the lines in the ceiling, and thinking about the fact that every single person in the world had been born from the result of an orgasm. Also that a good portion of those would, by default, have to have been really crappy orgasms.

Like, a fifteen year old dad would be standing in a hospital looking down at his baby and thinking, _you know what? So not worth it. I could have gotten a better orgasm if I went home and got a sock out of the drawer and stole one of my dad’s playboy magazines. Instead I got horrible sex and a baby. Screw this_.

Because of said train of thought about orgasms and birth, Darcy had been laughing into his pillow, knowing distantly that when she sat up, there would be lipstick smears on the white pillow case- it happened one out of three nights to her pillow, when she either didn’t bother or didn’t remember to wipe her makeup off before going to bed.

Pushing herself up on her elbows before slumping down again, she had seen a trail of it: bright red, in messy pinpoints over everything.

“Oops,” she had said, and most of it had been caught by the mattress. “Soooorry.”

“F’r what?”

“Lipstick,” Darcy had mumbled, and had decided that it was mostly coherent, so that was good. “Sorry.”

“’S fine,” Tony had said, obviously not knowing what she was talking about, still staring up at the ceiling. “Hey, Darcy?”

He always said it fast: _HeyDarcy_ , like it was one word. He used to piss her off with it: _HeyDarcy, HeyDarcy, HayDarcyyyy_ , until Darcy would push him off the couch or off the swings or off the sidewalk and into the road, which had resulted in some equally pissed off drivers who have had to swerve multiple times.

But this time, he had taken his time between the words.

Darcy had rolled her head upwards to meet his eyes, her hair spilling over her neck. “Yeah?”

“Do you want to make out?”

The question sort of bounced off of Darcy, who had been too drunk to care about much except whether or not she was going to throw up, and where she would aim said vomit. But when it had finally sunk in a few seconds later, she had squinted up at him.

She had tilted her head into the duvet, considering. “No. Do you?”

Tony had paused. Then he had frowned, looking over at her, like the idea hadn’t actually registered when he had said it before. “No.”

They had lain there with the walls sloping in at them, with drunken stupidity in their minds and in their mouths, and Darcy had realized that she honestly didn’t want anything with Tony other than what they had at the moment, and she probably never would.

Of course, she couldn’t stand up at the time and whenever she blinked her stomach started to rise, so she couldn’t exactly articulate that.

She had said, half-slurring it: “I, like, _never_ want to make out with you. Ever. No offence.”

“None,” Tony had said. “Taken, I mean. None taken. No offence whatsoever. The amount of offence we have right now is like- like- our hands are empty of offence. That is how much offence we don’t have.”

Darcy had rolled over so she was on her stomach, her cheek pressing into the crook of her left arm. “That made no fucking sense. At all.”

“Our hands are empty of sense, too,” Tony had said. “I don’t want to make out with you either, now that I think about it. That’s- that’s really odd. This is odd.”

Darcy had opened her mouth to say something, and then promptly forgot it.

“Okay,” she had said instead. “Let’s continue not making out.”

Tony had pulled one hand out from underneath him and had given her the thumbs up. “Grrrreat. Grrrroovy.”

A pause.

“Grrrrreg.”

Darcy had scrunched up her face, feeling the pinch of her nose against her arm. “’Greg’ isn’t a … a describing… thing.”

Tony had shifted his arm down to shove at her elbow. “ _You’re_ not a describing thing. And I was making ‘grrrr’ noises.”

He had prompted this with a slightly pathetic growl, and Darcy had started laughing, which had set Tony off, dissolving into hysterical drunken laughter in the middle of it.

It had always been one of the things that Darcy has loved just before it happened, while it was happening, and again when it was over: laughing with someone beside you, splayed out over the sheets and laughing so hard it turned into coughs, or hiccups, or, in some cases throwing up, which they both had been leaning towards.

So they laughed and nearly threw up and managed to stop just in time to only get to the point of dry-heaving, and Darcy found herself not wanting anything else out of him except laughing their asses off and trying not to throw up for as long as they could draw it out for.

 

They take their shoes off in the car before they get out- Clint’s boots, Bruce’s sneakers and Darcy’s flats, all thrown into the backseat next to where Darcy was sitting.

The concrete is wet and the rain isn’t hammering so much as lazing its way down; the wind long gone. Everything is sticky and humid, and from here, Darcy can see the hazy lights through the dark, strung around the tarp; the people who have already given up on keeping dry and have taken to dancing around outside it; the few people in the ocean which will eventually give way to at least half of the occupants of the party diving in.

In the middle, there’s a radio wrapped in plastic, along with the wires, all the way along to the lifeguard lodge a few dozen meters away from the tarp, which they plug it in to. Most of the time, someone leaves a gap in the plastic or someone kicks it away and water gets in and everything shorts out. People takes bets on how long it’ll take, or at all.

“It is indeed a _party_ ,” Bruce says, transfixed, and Darcy remembers that he hadn’t been here last year.

Clint snorts. “Duh, dipshit. Let’s get down there.”

Darcy pretends not to see the squeeze that he gives Bruce’s shoulder- the silent ‘ _come to me if anyone screws with you’_ that she’s seen Clint give him once in a while.

They start down the rocks before Darcy does, and she looks up for a second, shielding her eyes from the rain.

The blossoms are there, like always, and if she stands directly underneath them, it looks like the petals are blotting out the stars instead of the clouds.

“Let’s get down there,” she says, even though the other two are out of earshot, and pushes the rain out of her face.


	14. Chapter 14

Around about the first hour mark, the lightning starts and everyone loses their shit.

Tony thinks that it’s probably not so much exciting as it is potentially lethal, because there’s barely a second between the lightning and the thunder, which, if he remembers freshman year correctly, means there might be some trees getting fucked to shit very close to where they are.

He tells Darcy this and she looks over at him, eyes overly bright from the beer. Her hair is scattered with rain.

She says, “What?”

“Never mind,” Tony says. “It’s just that we all have a chance of dying horribly via getting struck by lightning. Don’t stand under any trees.”

She says, “What,” again, because they’re both yelling over the music, which is turned up louder than the sound of the rain hitting the tarp, which is louder than people trying to yell over everything, including the occasional thunder.

“Never mind,” Tony says. Then: “Let’s get out of here, I can’t hear anything.”

“What?”

Tony takes Darcy by the wrist and pulls until they’ve made their way through the throng of people, until they’re out from under the tarp and rain is trickling down their clothes, seeping in. He walks until they can hear themselves while only having to raise their voice, instead of full-out bellowing.

His own cup is empty- his second one, and it’s starting to hit his head- so he takes Darcy’s drink out of her hand and thinks about limits, and the lack of them.

Darcy frowns at him, her empty hand closing. “Hey.”

“Hey yourself,” Tony says, and decides that tonight is the kind of night to get monumentally and horrifically wasted, inevitable death by lightning or not. He brings the cup to his mouth and swallows what’s left of the contents, which is about half an inch of beer at the bottom.

Darcy shoves him hard enough so he stumbles, his bare heels uprooting the wet sand. There are footprints everywhere- the sand is cut into rough marks now, kicked and shoved and scattered: waves in their own right.

“I was going to drink that.”

“Sorry,” Tony says, and thinks of a record being scratched into the grooves until the vinyl finally gives way and gets sliced through. “I shall direct us both back to the keg and we will get epically pissed. It will be a story for the ages.”

“We shall,” Darcy says, and she sags to the side a bit when she takes a step.

Tony steadies her and she grins, loose and the kind of happy you get when you mix a cocktail of teenage wastelands with too much beer. She’s already far beyond tipsy- she had gotten here ten minutes before Tony did, and when he had seen her, she had been throwing back her third cup of the night.

The rain is drizzling down, more mist than anything else. It doesn’t match: drizzling rain and violent slaps of lightning, of thunder.

The ocean doesn’t, either- there are sluggish, choppy waves, loud but not loud enough to be heard over the music, the rain or the thunder. The water an inky black, one that swallows everything when you go under. There are about a dozen or so people in there, thrashing and pulling each other under, tackling each other into the waves and screaming about how fucking cold it is.

Darcy’s foot starts to come down on the ragged edge of a shell, but Tony manoeuvres her out of the way just in time, her foot hitting wet sand instead. She doesn’t notice, she just tips her head back and sticks her tongue out, catching raindrops on her tongue and on her eyelashes.

“Hey, Tony,” she says, her mouth still open, her tongue still out.

“Yes, my lovely drunken friend?”

Darcy closes her mouth and smiles at him again, and her arms spread, holding them out like wings. She hooks one of them around Tony’s shoulders but the other one stays splayed, coasting with non-existent feathers on a non-existent breeze.

“I’m glad,” she says, her movements liquid. “About you.”

“You’re glad about me what?”

She shrugs, and Tony feels the lift of it. “Fucked if I know. Like, I’m glad about the existence of you.”

“That made no sense.”

“Our hands are empty of sense, too,” Darcy says, and laughs into his neck.

“Again, you’re making zero sense of anything, Darcy.” Tony remembers it, faintly- the slow nausea, the lipstick on his pillow, Darcy’s hair knotted in her fingers as she had tried to brush it.

He looks down at her and there’s a slap of lightning in the distance, hard and fast and cutting downwards.

“Actually, my lovely drunken friend,” Tony says, watching Darcy’s uneven steps, “I think you’ve had quite enough to drink.”

He stops. She tries to keep walking, but his hand on her shoulder stops her, her ankle pushing into a log of driftwood.

“That’s boring,” she says. “You’re boring. You’re not even drunk yet.”

“I am,” Tony says, feeling the pulse of it now more than ever. “Not as drunk as you, but that can be rectified.”

“I thought you said-”

“I never said anything about _me_ stopping drinking,” Tony says, and a particularly heavy raindrop hits just above his ear, and he remembers the taste of vomit under his tongue while leaning his sweaty forehead against the door of the toilet stall.

He nods towards Darcy. “Stay here, I’m going to the keg. Don’t fall over anyone.”

Darcy groans, her head rolling on her neck in a way that it would never do if she was sober. “If you go back to the keg, you have to get me more beer, too.”

“You can barely walk without falling over.”

“Minor details,” Darcy says, and it smears somewhere as it comes out of her mouth. She lifts her hand and runs it down her face, pulling at her features. “Can we go into the ocean yet?”

The alcohol is lilting through him now, slick and slippery and making it hard to hold onto anything. He blinks, and his eyelashes catch for a second. “When the hell did that come into the conversation?”

“You said last week. That we’d go into the ocean. Pleeeease.”

Tony opens his mouth and the _yes_ and _no_ stumble into each other before they even get out. Then Darcy has her hand around his wrist and she’s pulling, and she’s half-tripping every few steps and Tony lets himself get dragged behind her.

There’s a loud crash of thunder, like a plate splitting down the middle, and there’s rain on Tony’s face and it’s dripping down, and he’s steamrollering past tipsy and heading straight into whatever comes next, and he tastes vomit where there isn’t any.

Then he looks up and Steve is standing there through a gap in the crowd, and the music and the waves and the lightning and everyone yelling- it all dissolves, running down the back of Tony’s neck with the rain.

It’s a glance that Tony tries to draw out as long as he can.

Steve is wearing a black dress shirt and jeans, as opposed to the usual clothes that Tony is used to seeing him in. For some reason Tony sort of misses the hideous checkered outfit that he, himself, wouldn’t be caught dead in.

The tips of Steve’s hair are wet, pushed out of his face with quirks of it sticking out, and it makes his blue eyes light up spectacularly- or maybe that’s the lanterns hung around the tarp reflected in his eyes, Tony doesn’t know. The light from the lanterns is like dye, tinting everything beer-bottle green.

He’s standing with his side facing Tony, and has his face tipped sideways as he talks to Bruce, who is at his right. His mouth is moving like the clear, full piano notes that Tony gave up on in fifth grade because they sounded stupid and slow in his hands. There’s a dusting of stubble across Steve’s chin and the flimsy green light sinks against him; into him.

Tony looks to the small, round buttons on Steve’s shirt that make up miles in their circumference, and thinks of distance, and the abundance of it.

Tony looks at him and he thinks of chasing Steve and his eyes and mouth and laugh and skinny wrists; his slim, cigarette-thin-fingers that Tony has only ever seen hold a cigarette that one time, half-remembered- it was a joint, maybe, but they both flared the same, bright and fast and over in a moment on that single breath in- when he was looking through a room of smoke and only seeing Steve.

It only lasts a second before someone walks in front of him, and then another person walks in front of the first person, and it goes on until Tony can’t sort through who anyone is.

And Darcy is still pulling and Tony is still walking, and then there’s water sloshing over his feet, up to his ankles before he can register it.

 

In middle school, halfway through their last year, Tony’s class had had gone on a field trip to an aquarium a few towns over. They had had to fundraise, get permission slips, hire a bus, yadda yadda yadda, and in the end it wasn’t that great, anyway. It was mostly cheap gimmicks and small fish in tanks, and all in all it was educational and wholly unremarkable, except for the shark tank.

Of course, everyone went straight for the shark tank- it wasn’t even a tank, really, it was a long corridor with curved glass for a ceiling. Through the glass there was a thin piece of ocean, and sharks were cutting their way through it.

Afterwards, Tony found out that they weren’t carnivorous sharks, but at the time, it more exciting to think otherwise. That it was just a thin layer of glass separating everyone from sudden death. Ignoring the fact that the sharks would flop around uselessly in a few inches of water, because there was at least three times as much floor space for people to walk on as there was water behind the glass.

In a twelve-year-old’s mind, it was electric: being a finger-length away from something that could kill you without even trying. Being a breath away from something so dangerous, from something that could swallow you whole.

He was grinning and it was blown up in his reflection, his face stretched in shiny, watery ribbons across the glass. He was right up close, pressing his face into the glass, and the shark swam right on by, its tail knifing in the space his reflection was.

Darcy was in the next room looking at the lionfish, and Clint was a few meters away with that weird group that he had started to hang out with- but he always came to Tony’s place after school with him and Darcy, so that was okay.

Anyway, there was a movie on in the dark room that Darcy was in, along with the lionfish and the starfish, both of which Tony found pretty but not lethal, hence less exciting, and Tony went in there to go and tell Darcy that he found the sharks.

Not many people were watching the movie, and even then, they were only half-watching it, distracted by the fish darting past in colourful streaks.

On the screen, there was a woman with good cheekbones and crooked teeth lying on the floor, curled up next to a man with ratty jeans and big eyes. It was in black-and-white, and everything looked like there was dust on it.

“We have time,” the man was saying, and Tony looked at him with resigned interest on his way across the room to Darcy.

The woman on screen sniffed. “Like hell we do. Don’t try to pull that on me, Lester, not after all of this. Don’t do that to me.”

“It will be fine,” the man said, and kissed her cheek. The woman hummed quietly, and rolled over so the camera showed a sliver of the swell of her breasts, pulled tight against her nightshirt.

Tony wondered why the fuck they were playing this in an aquarium, and the next few lines were lost as he craned his neck, looking for Darcy.

He spotted her over by the starfish, her finger trailing down the glass, and started over to her just as the woman said, “Remember what my Pa asked you?”

“Of course I do,” said the man, and Tony wasn’t watching as the woman said, “Remember how he asked you how you wanted to fall in love?”

Tony looked over at the screen, at the grey freckles on her grey face framed by the grey wall, and the woman was smiling as she said, “How do you want to fall in love, Lester?”

It hadn’t been directed at him, Tony knew that. It had been directed at that Lester guy, and Tony still doesn’t know what the hell that movie was.

Everyone has a few pointless moments that they shouldn’t remember that they can’t forget, that worms its way into their heads occasionally for no apparent reason- in Psychology class where the teacher is telling you that everything you do is motivated by fear or seeking pleasure, the moment where you thought someone was going to kiss you but they didn’t, that one time when you took a bite into an apple while crossing the road while wearing your favourite boots- and this was one of Tony’s: in mid-step in a darkened room with one of his hands pressing into the blunt corner of a fish tank,  and listening to the woman ask, ‘how do you want to fall in love?’

It comes up every once in a while, mostly when Tony is staring at Steve during class and trying not to.

It comes up again when he catches Steve through the crowd, when his clothes aren’t as horrible as they usually are and Darcy is stumbling them both into the water, and Tony imagines himself slipping into love instead of falling; colliding violently with everything on the way down and most likely ending up getting facial reconstructive surgery, and the doctors coming in and telling him that they’re sorry sir, but there was no way to save your nose, so now you look like Michael Jackson.

This is all processed with Tony’s drunk- and getting steadily drunker as the alcohol hits him- mind, and he considers taking out the Michael Jackson part of it as a wave hits his knees.

“I am questioning the judgement of everyone who thought it would be a good idea to let dozens of drunk teenagers go into the sea unsupervised and quite possibly drown,” he says, and swears under his breath as a wave licks up his shirt, because the sea, as it has always been in his experience, is fucking _freezing_.

Darcy shoves him. She shoves everyone a lot when she’s like this. “You can be a really articulate drunk sometimes.”

Tony can feel said articulate-ness draining away as the beer takes over, water coming up to his navel now, and up to Darcy’s chest. He shivers and takes a heavy step forwards, his clothes dragging with every movement.

“Congratulations on managing the word ‘articulate.’”

“Ve-he-hery proud,” Darcy says, and promptly gets a mouthful of seawater. She gags, turns her head and spits it out, and it’s then that Tony notices that she’s still bringing him forwards by his hand.

He pulls it out of her grasp too roughly and she lurches forwards, arms pinwheeling. He tries to grab her shoulder, she tries to grab for his hand; they both miss and latch at each other’s sleeves, staggering forwards and pitching into the water.

Tony has his mouth open to yell as he goes under, and regrets it immensely as he flounders for a hold on something, swallowing salt.

His fingers close on Darcy’s sleeve again as a wave tosses the both of them, and for a second Tony feels his other hand break the surface; water on both levels as the rain streaks his fingers and solid ocean smothers everything below his wrist.

His eyes slit open, stinging and blinking hard through the blind, wet darkness. He’s holding his breath and trying not to cough out the water that is now trying to force its way down his windpipe, because it would result in more swallowed water, which would result in Tony dying slowly in water that only comes up to his chest, which, quite frankly, would be an embarrassing  and decidedly un-epic story to tell at his funeral.

His knees hit the sand one after the other, and then he’s being yanked up by the front of his shirt.

Darcy is gulping air and more water when he finally manages to stand up without getting pushed over again by the waves that are now almost up to his collarbones, whipping over his head whenever a wave comes.

“F-fuck,” Darcy says, her voice stripped rough and raw.

The water slaps along with the thunder, and back on the beach, Tony can hear people cheering in time with the thump of the music.

“Shallows,” Tony says, and Darcy says, “What,” and Tony starts to say, “We need to get back to the shallows,” before twisting sideways to cough water, and giving up. He grabs her hand and she grabs back, fingers catching.

They both start towards the shore, hands bent together.

 Tony bites down on a yelp when a string of seaweed wraps around his ankle and wishes he hadn’t had that last drink, because he’s lightheaded enough from oxygen deprivation right now and the ocean looks infinitely deeper and monstrously bigger than any of the other times he’s been in it.

It looks liquid-black, like a pupil; feral and dark and yanking at them: the kind of ocean poets sit on the beach and write about when they’re pissed off and they need to vent. Tony hasn’t seen it like this before- he hasn’t been in the epicentre of something akin to tornado, a wild animal. He hasn’t had to tread water and hold his head up and sip air because taking huge breaths would only invite yet more ocean into his mouth.

As they walk, the water sags down to their waists, then their knees, then their ankles, and then Tony’s knees are hitting the sodden sand again and pulling Darcy along with him.

They lie there with the water washing around their feet, breathing raggedly and trying to spit out what’s left in the backs of their throats, when Darcy licks her lips- salty, down to the roots- and croaks, “That was a terrible idea.”

“In-” Tony stops; breathes in. “Indubitably.”

“Why the fuck,” Darcy says, sounding like a rusty wire, “did you let me do that.”

“Indu-” He stops again, trying to get his thoughts to stop skidding into walls. “We’re both reasonably drunk. And as you know, when we’re reasonably drunk everything seems like a good idea, up to and including-”

He hacks out another mouthful of saltwater, and rasps as he continues: “-going into the sea while drunk.”

Something is crackling through him- not anger, but close to it. “And I didn’t let you, you dragged me.”

Darcy eases herself up so she’s sitting, and everything comes away with sand on it. “Then you’re still a fucking idiot. Help me up.”

“Help your own fucking self up,” Tony snaps, too loud, and he looks away so he doesn’t see her surprised stare.

But he pushes himself onto his knees, then to his feet and takes her hand again, pulling Darcy until she’s standing upright and trying not to wobble too much as he does, still feeling the phantom tug of the waves.

She raises a hand and wipes her face, leaving shaky slashes of sand across it. Her eyes close tightly, and when they open again, they’re turned to the sky and are reflecting the lanterns. “So,” she says, lighter than usual, and there’s sort of a hook at the edge of her mouth, the one that she tries when she’s putting effort into saying something. “That was a really, really fucking terrible idea, and you’re a dipshit for going along with it.”

And she’s smiling, and she’s obviously trying, but Tony just- doesn’t play it back.

“Again, I didn’t go along with-” Tony tips his head up, and the rain tracks through the sand on his cheeks. “Fine. Whatever. Can we just- can we go and get dangerously, nauseatingly, emergency-room drunk somewhere else? I have a sudden urge to not be here at all. Not even in the general vicinity.”

When he looks at her, she’s already looking at him, the pillowed concern from before more defined now.

“You okay?”

Tony scrubs the sand off his chin with the heel of his palm, half out of wanting to and half out of needing something to do with his hands. His tongue is against one of his molars, then the inside of his cheek, scraping around the cave of his mouth and only tasting salt.

“What? Yeah, I’m- fine. I’m good. Great, even. I’m-”

‘I’m tired,’ he wants to say, and it’s on the back of his throat where he’s gargling saltwater. ‘I’m tired and Clint is over there with his shitty group of shitty friends with a bruise on his eye. I’m an asshole and Steve is beautiful and he’s the kind of guy people would build monuments for. I’m drunk and I don’t understand any of this, I don’t know why we all do this; why we all try so goddamn hard.’

It’s knocking around his mouth, slamming and beating until Tony squeezes his teeth together so hard his jaw aches.

He knows this is the time he usually goes off on a tangent, on one of his half-assed rants about nothing in particular, but he’s tired and drunk and an asshole and honestly, he doesn’t have the energy to bullshit his way through it.

 “You know what,” he says, and something clicks in his jaw, so he unclenches it.

The sea is still hitting their feet every few seconds, and Tony doesn’t have any feeling left in his toes. They’re lumping in the sand; there’s grit wedged in under his toenails. His fingernails, too, now that he thinks about it.

“You know _what_ ,” he repeats, and he’s shaking and he can’t tell if it’s from the cold. “I think we should get you home. You’re out past curfew.”

“They changed it to eleven,” Darcy says, still looking at him with that badly-concealed worry. “And– shit, Tony, are you sure you okay? You look-”

Her tongue flicks over her lips again: salt and more salt, like someone upturned a bag of it on both of their mouths; ran it through their hair and their clothes.

“I guess we could leave,” she says finally, slow and careful, eyes on him and staying there. “Seriously, are you-?”

“Spectacu-fucking-lacular,” Tony says, and it falls out flat rather than rolling like he meant it to. “Parties are overrated, anyway.”

She won’t stop looking at him like she’s tiptoeing, and Tony supposes he had it coming.


	15. Chapter 15

Steve is working his way through his third cup of beer, and he swears he can taste plastic from the cup dissolving somewhere in there.

Bruce’s elbow knocks into his, and he looks over.

“I just realized something,” Bruce says, and he has to lean in close to be heard, until his mouth is right next to Steve’s ear.

“What’s that?”

Bruce looks out over the people dancing- there are many more people just standing around the edges of the tarp, like they are, but there are still a lot of people dancing. Over by the side, there’s a group of girls grinding against the centre pole used to keep the tarp up, and their dresses flash their thighs every time they straighten up.

Bruce looks down into his cup, and takes a quick pull from it. “I don’t like parties.”

Steve huffs out a laugh under his breath. “I told you that you wouldn’t before we got here.”

“Well, I wanted to check.” Bruce casts another unimpressed glance down at his cup, like it said something bad about his mother. “Why’d we even come if we were just going to stand here?”

Steve doesn’t have to think about it before answering- he had already been over this with himself the year before- but he takes another slow sip of his beer before he says, “I guess it’s better than sitting at home. And besides, now we know for sure that we shouldn’t come to these kind of things.”

“I thought you came last year.”

“I did.” Steve finishes off his cup. “But you wanted to come, so I figured I’d let you find out by yourself.”

“How kind of you.”

“My generosity overwhelms me sometimes,” Steve says, and he can feel the cheap beer start to work; thrumming at the back of his eyes. “And we don’t have to stand here. We could dance.”

He does an exaggerated wiggle with his hips to punctuate this, and Bruce is smiling as he says, “There is no way in hell I’m going to dance. Not when I’m this sober, anyway.”

“That can be rectified,” Steve says, and his mouth is open to speak when he looks over at him just in time to see Bruce’s expression pull back, his gaze tilted upwards.

“Bruce? What-” Steve turns, following his gaze, and doesn’t get what he’s supposed to be seeing until the front of a truck folds into itself as it crashes into a cherry tree. The branches shudder on impact; blossoms shaking down onto the roof and the hood of the truck.

“Shit,” Bruce says, and then says it again, more panicked. “ _Shit_.”

It takes another second for it to kick in, and by that time, Tony and Darcy are opening opposite doors and climbing out of the truck. They’re both soaked through.

Darcy is gaping at the front of the truck, holding a drink that is spilling over her hand, and Steve sees her whip around to yell something at Tony that Steve can’t hear.

“That’s your car,” Steve says dumbly. “I mean, it’s Clint’s- your parent’s car, and- oh, shit.”

“Shit,” Bruce agrees shakily.

Steve watches as Darcy stops yelling and something in her face ticks, looking over Tony’s shoulder, down to the beach. Tony turns and Steve follows it, looking down the thick line of the beach-

“ _Shit_ ,” Bruce repeats, and Steve has to bite down on his tongue to stop himself from saying it with him.

Since no-one could actually hear it, only a few people had turned to look at the truck crashing, but in those few had apparently been a good portion of the Meats. A few of them are still being turned around to look, but most of them are pointing, yelling, charging angrily up the dunes. Clint is hanging back uselessly, still staring as the Meats push past him. He looks helplessly out of place, caught in between the two groups with wide eyes- and no jacket, for once.

“Come on,” Steve says, and has to yank on Bruce’s sleeve to get him to start moving, tripping forwards and dropping their empty cups as they walk out from under the tarp and into the rain, gaining pace as they go.

By the time they’ve climbed up the sand dunes, Tony is being shoved by Aaron, a guy who Steve has seen but never talked to.

Aaron shoves Tony once, twice, and then a third time, more roughly, into the door of the truck and holds him there.

His fists close in his shirt. He’s almost baring his teeth. “Why the fuck were you driving his car, huh?”

“Um,” Tony says, and his eyes flicker over to Clint, who is still making his way up the dunes. “It sounded like a good idea at the time?”

Aaron laughs, and it’s guttural; something scraping. “Where’d you get his keys? Steal them? Did you steal Beef’s fucking keys? How the fuck did you think that would turn out well, you stupid fuck?”

“Darcy had them,” Tony says, and he’s slurring it a bit. “And I was totally going to return them.”

One hand reaches up to close around Aaron’s wrist, tugging sloppily. “Do you think you can do me a solid and let me go? This shirt is wrinkled enough and I’m really not in the mood for this-”

Aaron shakes him, snapping him forwards and then back into the car, one of the mirrors pressing into Tony’s hip.

“Careful,” Tony says, blinking blearily and grinning, “someone might get the wrong idea-”

“You cheeky fuck,” one of the guys in front of him says- Matty, a freshman that tries too hard at the best of times- and surges forwards, his hand coming up into a fist.

Too many people move at once: Aaron moves back; Darcy, Steve and Bruce lurch towards him, and Clint finally scrambles to his feet on the concrete, hand stretched towards them, and blurts, “Wait!”

Tony is in a perpetual flinch even as Matty’s fist lowers, confused.

Clint absorbs it- everyone is staring at him uncertainly, and he takes it and fills out his shoulders with it. “I gave Darcy my keys. It’s cool.”

Everyone sort of glances at each other, but no-one moves towards either of them.

Skeet shifts from one foot to the other, his hand curling. “But Tony-”

“He wrecked my fucking car, and I’ll deal with him,” Clint says, but the growl isn’t directed at Tony. “We’ll get him back for it later, but right now we have a party to get back to. Drinks to drink, chicks to plough. Hey, Jugs.”

He’s easing into it like he was born to play the part and Darcy plays it right back to him, tilting her head and smiling like a bonfire and saying, “Hey, asshat,” with a bright red mouth and a tight, black dress that are both impossible to ignore, even though the rain.

Clint makes his eyes drag down the length of her body before pulling them back to Skeet- not even Skeet, actually. He’s addressing the crowd, and Steve can’t help but imagine Jesus and his disciples, or Satan and his worshippers, or some bad popstar and their screaming fans, because when Clint speaks, they all listen.

“Let’s get back to the party. We’ll deal with that shithead on Monday.”

There’s a resounding wave of approval that goes around. Clint gets slapped on the shoulder about four times as people pass him, and the rest of the Meats start to trickle back towards the dunes.

Aaron unclenches his hands from Tony’s shirt, and claps him hard on the chest with both palms open.

“Nice bruise,” he says, and his mouth is twisted sideways.

“Thank you,” Tony says flatly, and Aaron snickers as he turns away.

Clint tells them all that he’ll catch up, and he gets another few manly slaps on the shoulder, because apparently that’s what they do to prove their manliness. Or their companionship. Or something.

He waits until all the Meats are at least halfway down the dunes before looking at Tony. “What the fuck, man?”

Tony’s smile cracks at the edges. “I’m incredibly and immeasurably sorry for crashing your car?”

“My _parents’_ car,” Clint says, and his hand shifts over his face, in his shirt, to his pocket, and back again. “I- fuck, I’ll be grounded for- what the _fuck_ , man?”

“Be thankful I was there,” Darcy says from beside him, folding her arms, and it’s obvious from the slant in everything she does that she’s twice as drunk as Steve is, if not more. “He wanted to crash into it again. I was like, ‘what?’ And he was all, ‘you don’t get insurance if it’s a small dent.’ And I was like, ‘that doesn’t sound right.’”

“A _small_ dent,” Clint and Bruce echo at the same time, incredulous, and it’s the most brotherly that Steve has seen them act in a few months.

 Clint gestures towards the almost completely crushed front of the car. “Does that look like a _small dent_ to you?”

“It looked better in the car!”

“Yeah, I bet it looked way better behind the wheel of _my parent’s car,_ which they _allowed_ me to drive here, which-” Clint stops, a hand over his mouth. “Shit. _Shit_.”

His hands won’t stay still: they go to his face again, raking through his hair, clutching handfuls before rubbing them down his neck. “You fucking- you _idiot_ , you-”

“Did I mention how incredibly and immeasurably sorry I was,” Tony tries, and gets a seething glare from both of the brothers in return.

Darcy takes a step forwards before her foot wavers, and she stops. “Okay. Calm. Calm is good, so let’s… be it. Obviously, by my composure and… things, none of us are sober enough to deal with anything right now, especially not Tony crashing your car. Sorry about that, by the way, it was probably, like, a third my fault. But two thirds his fault- maybe four fifths, even- because he can’t drive for shit.”

“I can dri-”

“You just crashed into a tree while you were trying to turn the truck around.”

“I’m drunk! Exceptionally and- and meanderingly drunk!”

“We noticed, and you’re just using random adjectives,” Bruce says, and Steve realizes that he’s the most sober person within a three-meter radius at the moment. His hands are bunched at his sides, and he looks almost as pissed off as Clint does.

“And to be honest, _I’m_ considering punching you.”

Tony snorts. “I’d love to see that, actually. Way to bludgeon the status quo.”

He lifts a hand to wipe rain away so it doesn’t drip into his eyes, and for a moment, Steve catches him… folding in on himself slightly. His eyes dull, the tug in his mouth drops, and he looks- tired. But it only lasts in that one moment, and then he’s smiling semi-easily and leaning back on the truck and saying, with only a bit of a heavy slide to it: “So, coffee?”

Bruce continues to glare. “Nothing’s open.”

“Dude,” Darcy says, lifting a hand towards Steve and then dropping it. “He works in a coffee shop. They probably give him keys and shit.”

Steve blinks. “Why can’t we have coffee at someone’s place?”

“Boooring.” Tony looks over at him, and then down before Steve can meet his eyes. He squeezes his teeth between his bottom lip, hard enough to hurt and quick enough that Steve almost misses it.

Bruce says, “Clint, are you coming, or…?” but he trails off, because they all know how that’s going to end.

Clint looks at all of them, head-on. But when he says, “I have to get back to the party,” he trips over the last word like it’s wearing on him, thudding at the seams.

Tony nods. “Right-o. They must have their leader. Have fun, and- yeah. Sorry about your car. Ah. We’ll laugh about this in a few years?”

Another unimpressed glare, and Tony sighs. “Oookay. So we’re not at that point yet. Pretty please accept my humble and upmost apology?”

Then he steps towards him, his hand coming out and- and holding his pinkie towards him?

Clint- who seems used to this- just looks at him for a second, his lips thinned, before shrugging hotly and holding his pinkie out. It’s a quick grasp, a second at the most, and then they both drop their hands.

Both Steve and Bruce exchange a look, but they keep silent.

“You owe me,” Clint says. “And you, Darcy.”

“Hey, I didn’t-”

“Did _none_ of you listen to any drunk driving seminars,” Bruce hisses.

He might just be tipsy, but he thinks he catches Tony staring over at the two of them when Steve reaches up to squeeze Bruce’s elbow, like, _breathe_.

 

It’s an eight minute walk- probably- from the beach to the coffee shop, and Darcy whines the entire way until she starts listing sideways and falls ungracfully into a bush.

Steve and Tony carry her into the shop (they have to leave her on the steps for a minute as Steve goes through the potplant outside the door for the key) and manage not to bump her into too much furniture as Steve directs them all into the room out the back. They lie her down on the couch there and she mumbles something into her shoulder that Steve doesn’t hear.

By the time they get back Bruce has started up the coffee machines, and Tony falls on his cup with the vigour of underage-drunk person, gulping it down without regard for his tongue.

Steve watches him and Bruce watches him watching Tony, and they all look away when the other person glances up.

Outside, the lightning burns itself out.

 

Steve had met Tony on their third day of middle school, when everyone was still getting used to their mother induced back-to-school haircuts which ended too high up their necks.

It hadn’t been the first time Steve had seen him- that had been on the first day, in the first half hour, and Tony had been leaning back against the wall with long legs and big hair and something about him that blared ‘bright.’

And not bright as in smart, either- bright as in blazing, as in electricity humming under his skin, as in wires crossing and suns flaring behind this strange boy’s eyes.

It had been a beautiful double-take, which Steve hadn’t done before. A double-take, that is. He had read about them, but until then, he hadn’t really understood what it had meant.

He still remembers it: the carpet scraping on the heels of his shoes as he had turned, the cold curl of breath in his mouth as he had sucked in too hard, the lack of light in the overstuffed room; how Tony had been rubbing his hands over the nape of his neck.

Over time, it comes to be something that he relates to Tony: double-takes, because on that first day, he hadn’t talked to him, or even made eye contact, but he had seen Tony through the crowd and his gaze had slipped right over him. Then when it had registered, he had almost stumbled over his own feet stepping backwards and craning his neck to see him again, because there had been something about him that made Steve need to stare.

Tony and double takes, Steve has found, go hand in hand.

But he didn’t actually talk to him until two days later, when Steve and Bruce had been sitting on the steps outside the classroom and revelling over the fact that they had gotten into the same class, unlike last year where they had had to meet each other on the porch every day.

Bruce had been turning a piece of bark from the garden over in his hands, tossing it to Steve and having Steve toss it back to him, and their hands had both been getting steadily dirtier when Bruce had looked over Steve’s shoulder, squinting.

“Uh,” he had said, and Steve had turned to see three figures in the way of the sun.

He had known Darcy at that point, but only vaguely- they used to carpool for a while in second grade, when Steve’s mom’s car had broken down for a week. She had walked over and had stood with her feet apart, her arms folded.

One thing about Darcy: she always walks like she has somewhere to be.

He had only known Clint as Bruce’s twin brother- present, but not relevant. The most Steve had seen of him is when they had all watched Bob the Builder together sometimes after school, all gathered in the middle of Steve’s room with hot chocolate that Steve’s mom had made for them. Once, Clint had gotten his hand caught in the door to the kitchen, and it had taken both Steve and Bruce to get him to calm down after.

The third person had been Tony, but Steve didn’t know that yet. On the hot steps with Bruce, he had just recognized him as the boy from that first half hour, the one with bright eyes and bright everything else.

“There,” Darcy had said. “You’ve seen him. Can we go now?”

Steve had frowned. “Seen who?”

“No-one,” soon-to-be-Tony had said, and his accent had rolled, coasting lightly. “Darcy’s being dumb. What’s your name?”

“I’m Steve,” Steve had said, and then pointed at Bruce with his whole hand. “That’s Bruce. He’s Clint’s brother. But not big brother, ‘cause they’re twins.”

“I know that,” soon-to-be-Tony had said, affronted. “I’m not dumb. It’s obvious. They have the same smile and nose ‘n all that. I’m Tony. Your name is dumb.”

Later, Tony’s name would come to fit him the same way double-takes did: Most people grow into their names the same way they grow into hand-me-downs, but Tony has just always been Tony. Steve would think of Tony’s hands, or what he said that day.

Steve had blinked hard, trying to keep track of the rapid switch in subjects. “I don’t think so.”

“Well, it is,” Tony had said, drawing out the ‘is’, and for a split second, Steve had been back in the epicentre of that double take in that crowded room again, looking at him through the tangle of arms and backpacks with his breath thudding in his throat, with pinwheels whirring behind his ribs and his heartbeat slamming unsteadily.

Beside him, Bruce said, “Is too,” and Clint pushed at his shoulder and told him to shut up. Bruce pushed back-it was a rehearsed tug of war that only siblings are capable of; that they already knew the end of, with the steps that they could go through in their sleep. They both scowled at each other.

Tony looked at the both of them, and then back at Steve. “How old are you?”

“Eleven,” Bruce and Steve said at the same time, and Steve followed it up with: “What about you?”

“Eleven and two fifths,” Tony had said, and Steve had realized that he, himself, was probably about eleven and four fifths, but he didn’t mention it.

Steve had told him that no-one does that anymore, and Tony had said, “Does what?”

“That,” Steve had said. “Put stuff after your age. We’re all eleven, and the months and stuff don’t matter.”

“But being nearly twelve is better than just being eleven.”

“It’s the same thing.”

“Is not.”

“ _I_ think it is,” Tony had said, still frowning, a confused dent in between his eyebrows, like something about Steve had thrown him off.

Darcy had been silent for almost all of this, her arms coming tighter and tighter around her chest, her fingers tapping impatiently. She had shoved her hair back, saying, “These guys are boring. We said we were gonna go to the swings.”

“The swings are for _babies_ ,” Clint had said. “And I don’t wanna hang out with my _brother_. Let’s go to the field. We can climb the Board.”

The board had basically just been eight thick planks nailed together and set on the curve of a hill, jutting out of the ground, but it had already been dubbed the thing to do at break. The height of the social ladder was to be seen sitting with your friends on the top of the Board- in the end, Steve only went on it once, and it hadn’t been anything like he had imagined it. He had spent the whole ten minutes squirming, trying to get a good hold, and when he had pushed himself off, he was forced to pick splinters out of the backs of his knees for the rest of the day.

Darcy and Clint had turned to leave, but Tony had stood there, his head tilted, staring at Steve.

“Tony,” Darcy had said, and Clint had started on the ‘n’ of it when-

Tony had taken a few steps back, eyes still on Steve. Then, slowly, like he didn’t mean to, a smile started forming on his lips- it had been small, just a curl of his mouth, but Steve found himself mimicking it, and then blowing it out of proportion: a full-blown grin, teeth everywhere and lips stretched over them without even meaning to.

Tony’s tiny smile had flickered, but hadn’t gone.

“Your name’s still weird,” he had told Steve, and there was still that part of his voice which sounded confused, like Steve is some mysterious puzzle piece that he’s yet to click into place.

“I know,” Steve had replied, again. “So’s yours.”

Tony’s smile had continued to shift uncertainly, but it had still been there when he had turned away.

Middle school passed in jerks and starts. People got nicknames and lost them just as fast, except for the few that stuck. Relationships were butchered and things were yelled and acne ran rampant. Groups got added on and taken away from, firsts were had (first kisses, first times getting drunk, first cigarettes, first girlfriends, first boyfriends- it goes on), and high school was eagerly looked forward to.

Then high school actually happened, and the disappointment was almost palpable. Groups split and packs formed, a majority of the acne got marginally better, people’s hands started moving lower, futures were either accumulated or given up on, and Steve stayed where he always was: in the middle of the crowd.

He stayed friends with Bruce- which was a given, because that’s the one thing he had assured himself wouldn’t change- and turned in his homework on time in most of his classes.

He watched as his classmates- people he had known since he was six, people whose pools he had nearly drowned in, people whose parents he had to apologize to for breaking a plate, people who were once six years old and gap-toothed and loud- started to avoid him in the halls. As they broke off and blended in and did whatever it took to fit into anywhere they could possibly fit into.

Clint becoming the head bully wasn’t expected, but Steve said hi to him every time he passed him, even after Skeet and Roller- Mitch and Lee, he remembered, because he used to go over to Lee’s house to play with his action figures, and if that isn’t a purely figurative slap to the face then he doesn’t know what is- slammed him into a locker and threatened him with what would happen if he kept ‘acting fresh’ to them.

Clint never met his eye when that happened, and he always walked off when Steve tried to bring it up later.

“He’s cool,” Clint had said once, when Skeet had one hand fisted in Steve’s shirt on a particularly shitty Monday. “He’s cool, man.”

They had left him alone for the most part after that, except for the side-smirks he still got sometimes; the careless shoves, the rare coughed comments that Steve pretended not to notice.

Darcy had started wearing the minimal amount of clothing she could get away with that was stated in the school guidelines, and kept walking like she always did- like she had someplace to be, but this time she had her chest thrust out and her smile painted on with dark red lipstick.

Watching Darcy laugh at some meaningless joke and re-adjust the push up bra that she doesn’t need and twist her hair around her finger, watching Clint jeer at a terrified freshman and put his fist through a locker door but never actually do anything to hurt anyone, Steve had thought to himself that the people around here reset the phrase ‘fake it till you make it.’

And then there was Tony- tight smiles turned to loose, sloppy ones as he had started coming to school wincing at the light and wearing sunglasses indoors. He had started talking in rambling, nearly nonsensical sentences, and Steve tried to catch every one that he could, even when it felt like he was grabbing at nothing and his fingers were going right through.

They didn’t talk often- the occasional nod in class, or if they were paired together in a project, or if one of the Barton-Banner twins came to class with bruises again, so most of the time, they didn’t speak unless it was in relation to somebody else.

The brightness never went out, though- always the same jumbled haze of it somewhere under all that bluster, all those smokescreens that he pretended not to have. He kept showing up reeking of sweet, tangy smoke, or the dull bite of alcohol before he washed it out. He kept burning cigarettes down to his fingers and stumbling when he shouldn’t. He kept fading fast, and one time the day before winter break Tony had been grinning, being dragged by the scruff of his shirt to the principal’s office for getting caught smoking on school grounds. Steve had had to bite his lip to stop the bitter bark of laughter when he thought _clap if you believe in faeries_ , like if he did, Tony would stop losing all that light.

He was still the same kid Steve had did a double-take at through the crowd, just- more of him. Or less of him; Steve could never really tell which.

High school kept on being high school, and the packs kept on being packs, and everyone kept on losing their light, bit by bit.

 

Steve had kissed Tony when they both had smoke in their mouths, in Clint and Bruce’s crowded, tiny lounge in sophomore year.

It hadn’t been a party, per se, more like someone texting too many people at once and bringing too many drugs and getting someone to bring too much alcohol, and it turned into Clint and Bruce’s tiny house getting full to the brim of the Pot-Pack and the Meat Pack (who generally mesh together peacefully) with varied other packs strewn about.

Bruce had gotten lost in the fray, somewhere in between trying to protect his room and trying to get a girl with dreads to not break the blender, so Steve was sitting up on the arm of a couch with a joint pinched in his fingers and thinking that it didn’t even matter if he smoked it; there was so much second hand smoke in here that he’d get high anyway.

It had already begun to set in, even before Steve had taken a pull. He felt dizzy, disconnected, like his limbs weren’t attached to his body- it was different from last time, where he had felt like he was floating, like everything was right with the world and he could do anything he ever wanted.

He put the joint to his lips, feeling his tongue wet the paper, and sucked it in. He managed three seconds of it before he started coughing, his eyes watering, and he felt it go to his head as he did- _there_ was the floating feeling, right on cue, drifting up from his toes and making his fingers tingle.

He was wearing a dopey, smeared smile before he realized it, and stretched out over the wall, arms coming out in an eagle-spread against the plaster.

By the time he opened his eyes again, he had taken six more pulls, the music had turned into a writhing grind, and the joint was dropping ash onto the carpet. He giggled at it, and it came out thick and smoky, like everything else.

He stubbed out the joint and closed his eyes again, letting his head drop back.

“Didn’t expect you to be at one of these things,” someone slurred however long later, and Steve had slit his eyes open to see Tony with the same smeared smile as him, his hand fisted around the neck of a bottle.

Steve raised his eyebrows. “You’re _drunk_.”

“You’re high,” Tony shot back, and his grin had gotten bigger. “Why are you even here, man?”

Up until then, Steve hadn’t heard Tony call anyone ‘man’ before. “Bruce and Clint’s house, duh. I was studying with Bruce. ‘N then people started. Started… getting here.” He giggled quietly.

“You’re really high,” Tony laughed, and even in the cramped, smoke-filled room, he was beautiful. His shirt was rumpled, hitched up slightly so Steve could see a thin sliver of his bare hip, and Steve’s mouth went dry from it.

Steve watched as Tony’s mouth had fitted around the lip of the bottle, and tipped it back. He watched as Tony had swallowed twice, and then blink hard when he came up for air. His eyes were tracking, and everything he did was too loose. “Unfortunately for you, I’m high _and_ pissed off my ass, hence I win.”

Steve opened his mouth to ask why being angry makes him win, and then cut himself off with another giggle. “Oh! Oh, in- in England, you say ‘pissed’ and it means ‘drunk. Oh, that makes sense.”

His giggling, at that point, had been high-pitched and slightly hysterical, and Tony had been smiling like he had been knocked over the head.

“Uh,” Tony said, and Steve hadn’t heard him say that, either. “Oopsies? I’m trying to cut back on the Brit slang as of late.”

“I like it,” Steve said, and whatever else he had been feeling was dissolving under the layers and layers of how utterly stoned he was at that moment. “Anyone who says that it’s dumb is dumb.”

“You’re really, really high,” Tony said, his voice dragging drunkenly, his mouth creasing even further, and Steve had wanted to eat his grin off of his face. “I mean, you’re genuinely and totally trashed. I can hear your brain cells withering and dying as we speak. Which we are. Speaking, I mean.”

Tony’s eyes were glazed over, glassy and distant, and Steve could see himself reflected in his huge, liquid-black pupils, as big as blown glass bowls.

But there was still that smile, still that muted light, and Steve thought about bringing a hand around Tony’s head, about pushing his fingers through his hair and pulling him in to taste whatever’s in his mouth.

Steve thought about kissing him, and then, like he always did when he thought about kissing him, he thought about how when you jump, the force of it shoves the earth downwards. And then, when you come back down, it pulls the earth back to where it was a moment ago, but both movements are so microscopically tiny that no-one notices. He thought of how many people in the world must be jumping right now, or getting ready to, or coming back down, and he thought about kissing Tony and the glorious light that filled him up to the edges, and the world getting yanked too many places at once.

Any other time he would have brushed it off like he always did, but this time he had been happy and relaxed and dangerously high for the second and last time, to the point where he thought he was seeing notes drifting from the radio out of the corner of his eye.

Suddenly, kissing Tony seemed like the best idea in the world, like maybe it would solve everything, and he wasn’t able to remember why he hadn’t done it before. It seemed like the best idea in the world to have his fourth kiss with his second person in a room where no-one would pass a drug test, or be able to drive home afterwards.

In the back of his mind, he remembered his fifth-grade teacher saying something about drugs lowering your inhibitions, and it got swamped by the weed that had been coursing through his system at the time.

He pushed himself off the arm of the couch, both of his feet hitting the carpet steadily. His damp hand closed around Tony’s wrist, which was just as sweaty, and he walked himself backwards and Tony forwards until Steve’s back was pressing up against the window and Tony was half-covered by a curtain that Steve had once tried to make a hat out of in first grade. The ragged snips left over from it were hanging over Tony’s elbow.

Steve noticed that they’re almost the same height- Tony didn’t needed to duck his chin or anything, just look down slightly, under his lashes in a way that had made Steve’s grip tighten.

Tony said, “Hey,” in a sort of distracted way, but the last half of it got lost against Steve’s bottom lip.

Steve kissed him open-mouthed and sloppily and Tony tasted like the grass end of the joint he had just been smoking, like bad beer, like something roasting slowly under his tongue, and Steve thought that he probably didn’t taste any better.

He kissed him and it had been horrible, teeth mashing together for a second, warm spit stringing down Steve’s chin and he didn’t know who it had belonged to.

It didn’t last long- three seconds, maybe- but then Steve had drawn back and Tony was swaying a bit.

“Right-o,” Tony said, wide-eyed and staring down at him. “That was. Huh. Drunk now.”

Steve realized that he was going to feel incredibly, irrationally panicked about this later, but at that moment, it had lazed slowly underneath the blur of smoke.

“You’re already drunk.”

“No,” Tony said, still swaying. “I mean, yes. But I’m going to get drunk now. More drunk than I am. Okay. Drunk now. See you in Bio. And Home Ec. And. Stuff.”

“Bye,” Steve said, almost groggy, and had wiped the drool off his chin with the back of his hand.

He didn’t stay long after that. Bruce found him, and he had been half-stoned from just being in the house.

Bruce grabbed his sleeve and had got them both outside, where they sat against the wall of the house and gulped fresh air and waited for the inevitable police cars to show up, which took less than ten minutes. Then they went over to Steve’s house, because Bruce’s had been pretty much wrecked. Or at least his bedroom was.

Steve hadn’t seen Tony again that night, but he had texted Clint who apparently had to call Pepper to drive both Darcy and Tony home, since Darcy had passed out under the kitchen table and Tony had been lying in the bathtub, almost unconscious, with three empty bottles and the Barton-Banner family dog at his feet, who had been taking refuge in the bathtub ever since people started coming over.

He didn’t bring it up with Tony, although there weren’t many chances to, anyway. He didn’t even know if Tony remembered it or not- there were a few times when he thought that he did, but he never had hard evidence of it. All he had was a few questionable glances during Bio, some offhand comments, and those looks that he still got sometimes- the confused ones, the wrinkle in between Tony’s eyebrows, with his lips slightly parted- and every time Steve finds one of those being directed at him, he’s back on the warm concrete with bark in his hands on the third day of middle school, again, again, and again.

 

 


	16. Chapter 16

Tony wakes up wedged between two very firm, very perky breasts, and realizes three things in rapid succession.

One: they were Darcy’s. Two: he shouldn’t be able to recognize someone’s boobs from lying facedown in them. And three: he had never wished he was attracted to her more that he did in that moment.

He lets this all sink in before he eases his face out and reaches up to scrub his sleeve over his forehead and down his cheeks, because it’s incredibly warm in between her breasts and they’ve both been sweating. Also, they both still stink heavily of saltwater.

He sits up and almost falls off the couch- it takes a minute for it to come back to him, and even then it comes it pieces. Crashing Clint’s truck. Carrying Darcy inside the shop. Drinking coffee, vomiting it up again and then falling asleep on the couch next to Darcy at around 2 in the morning.

When he presses it, the couch is warm and damp, like the rest of Tony. Everything sticks to his skin when he touches it.

“Darcy.” He pushes her arm as he crouches down. “Wake up. I seem to have accidentally-sort-of-motorboated you for a few hours last night.”

Her eyes slit open and she squints up at him for a second and holds her hand out. He straightens up; drags her off the couch and onto her feet, and she mumbles a ‘thank you’ before dropping his hand.

She stifles a yawn and stretches, her shoulder popping. “Bound to happen sometime. Where are the other two?”

Tony opens his mouth to ask _what other two_ when a crash, like something shattering, rings out from the next room over, making them both startle.

Fast footsteps on wood, and then Bruce is poking his head around the door. “I- hey, you’re up. Do you guys want coffee?”

When he gets no reply except for them both staring blearily at him, he nods. “I’ll take that as a yes. Come on.”

They follow him out to the shop, where Steve is sweeping up what looks like the remains of a broken pebble-filled teacup, which, to be honest, Tony thinks there’s quite enough of in this shop, so kudos for Steve on getting rid of one.

The pebbles are scattered in a four-meter radius around it, and Tony thinks he sees a few loose ones even further than that. He avoids stepping on them as he walks over them, anyway.

Steve glances up, then down to the cup and and then up again, lightning-quick, like he didn’t notice them the first time. “Hey.”

“Hey,” Darcy says, and Tony doesn’t trust his voice at the moment, so he just nods and waves a hand in his direction.

He wishes he had remembered Steve before he had walked out, because then he would have probably snuck out the back door, because he reeks like everything that has ever smelt bad in the history of the world, and he doesn’t think he looks much better.

 

And how could he _not_ remember Steve, what the fuck, how could he not remember Steve being so fucking careful when lowering Darcy onto the couch, Steve jolting forwards when that guy tried to hit him, Steve’s hair dripping in his eyes, Steve’s syrupy, hiccup-y laugh when Tony had tried to make a joke before passing out-

He remembers, slowly, like climbing up and over, Steve sitting next to him and rubbing his hand when he was throwing up the coffee and whatever else was left in his stomach.

He remembers dry-heaving through most of it instead of actually vomiting, and being all too aware of Steve’s thumb and forefingers making soft dents in his palm and the back of his hand, and Steve saying at one point, “I don’t know, I think the last time we met when we were both under the influence ended up a lot better than this did.”

Tony remembers thinking seriously for a second about sticking his fingers down his throat to speed up the process, but then chickening out because of Steve being less than an arm’s length away. He was going to keep whatever dignity he had left, goddamnit, even if he was knelt over a toilet and feeling feverish and wanting to die because he still couldn’t throw up on cue.

He had licked his lips and said, his voice like sandpaper: “Wh’t last time?”

And Steve’s fingers had stilled before withdrawing completely, and instead coming up, hesitant, to the knob of his spine, still rubbing slow circles. “Um. Clint and Bruce’s house, last year? A week before Darcy’s birthday?”

Darcy’s birthday, Tony remembered: they had gone bowling and had gotten drunk on schnapps that she had stole from her dad’s liquor cabinet, and hadn’t gotten kicked out because Darcy had pushed out her chest at the manager when he tried to get them to leave.

Clint and Bruce’s house, he remembered thick plumes of smoke and a dog shivering next to him and someone trying to bum a cigarette off of him in the middle of the stairs, but nothing else. “N’t ringing any bells, sorry. Enlighten me?”

As he was congratulating himself on not passing out yet and still being able to string together sentences that made sense, Steve’s hand had dropped again.

“Um,” he had said. “We were both really high, and you were drunk. Um, as well. And we might have- we, uh, kissed.”

It had been a telling sign on Tony’s part on how crappy he was feeling that he didn’t bolt up and make a run for it. Instead, he had absorbed this, wished to die a bit, pushed his head deeper into the toilet bowl and had slurred, “Bugger,” because his British always seemed to bleed into the conversation when he forgot to stop himself.

“I kissed you? S’rry.”

“No,” Steve had said, and his hand had come up again before hovering in mid-air, and then coming down fast to his lap. “I, uh. Me. I did. Kissed you, I mean. I kissed you.”

Tony hadn’t raised his head out of the toilet bowl, because he was sure if he did, the first words out of his mouth would be ‘ _why did you kiss me_ ,’ which sounded weird and clingy and sort of self-loathing in all the wrong places, so he had cleared his throat and the sound had echoed around the bowl. This time, he had tried to make his mouth form everything properly.

“Right-o. Still sorry. I’m a terrible kisser when I’m drunk. ‘nd high. Wow, I must’ve, like. Slobbered. Sorry.”

“There was a bit of slobber,” Steve had admitted, and Tony had felt the places Steve’s hand had been touching a minute ago- the panel of his spine as it had brushed over, the fleshy part of his palm and the curve of his thumb and half of his fingers- like they were colder than everything else, which was odd, because his knees had been pressed into the tiles, and they were freezing.

 

Tony had thought that if he kissed him right then, Steve would taste like sand, sweat, and leftover adrenaline.

And if Tony kissed him right now, he would still taste like that. And Tony would taste like Darcy’s boobs. God, he needed to sho-

“There’s a shower if you go through the room you were just in and turn right when you get outside,” Steve says, and Tony has a terrifying moment which mostly consists of _oh dear god he can read minds I am screwed to hell and back and then back again oh god kill me_ before he realizes that anyone, anywhere would be able to tell that they need a shower, because they look like crap.

“Dibs, and if anyone tries to beat me there I’ll fucking strangle you,” Darcy says tiredly, and turns around, smearing a hand over her eyes. “To the right?”

“The right,” Steve nods. “Also, you have twelve missed calls.”

Darcy flinches, pausing in her steps for a second. “Yeah. Fuck. It’s a long way past curfew.” She rubs at her eyes again, and then at her hair, which seems to be the breaking point, because she makes a face and says, “Fuck it, I’ll text them after a shower.”

“Priorities,” Tony yells after her, and then he turns around, catching Bruce’s back as he ducks into the kitchen, and then it’s just him and Steve, who is still sweeping up the bits of broken teacup.

Steve starts sweeping everything towards the door, and says, “He hasn’t had his yet. Yours is over there, but it’s kind of cold, s-”

“At this point of hungover I’d drink anything with caffeine in it, I don’t care if it’s cold,” Tony says, and gets a small smile in response, which he wasn’t expecting.

He takes the coffee and sits down at the table which is lacking a pebble-filled teacup, which he supposes is the one Steve knocked off, and concentrates on his coffee as Steve methodically sweeps everything out the door and into the garden framing the footpath.

Steve closes the door behind him and props up the broom next to it, dusting his hands on his pants. “Still raining.”

Tony nods, feeling the coffee start to hit his system. It’s lukewarm, but decent enough. “I think it’s going to be another two-week thing this year.”

He takes another mouthful- gorgeous, smooth, lifesaving caffeine- and says, “By the way, where the hell did you two sleep?”

Steve glances up at him from where he’s pouring milk into a mug, and then back down at it. “What? Oh, my boss- Mr. Parsons, he practically lives here, hence the shower. He has some hammocks in one of the rooms behind the kitchen. Uses them for ‘guy’s nights.’ I don’t want to know.”

“Hammocks,” Tony repeats, and a side of his mouth comes up before he can force it down. “What, did you use the other hammocks as blankets?”

Steve stays silent, skimming off the foam, and Tony barks out a laugh. “You did! God, that must have been so uncomfortable. God, I’m sorry we took the couch.”

“And _that_ looked comfortable, two people jammed onto one tiny couch,” Steve says, but he’s smiling- that same small, almost surprised smile from before, and Tony loves the quirked curve of it.

Tony nods curtly. “Point proven,” he says, and watches the slow slide of Steve’s hips as he comes to sit across from him, his cup steaming slightly.

He looks down before Steve’s lips come together to blow on the contents of his cup as he raises it to his mouth, and when he lowers it, there’s a light dusting of foam on his upper lip.

Tony says, “You’ve got a little-” and Steve says, “Yeah, I know, I’ll just-” and wipes it off with his sleeve, which is stiff with sweat.

There’s a small silence where they both sip their drinks and don’t look at each other, and it’s weirdly comfortable.

Tony clears his throat quietly. “Triple shot?”

“What?”

Tony nods down at his coffee. “Did you make it a triple shot?”

“Duh,” Steve says, like it’s two plus two. Then he goes quiet, like he shouldn’t know what Tony always orders, even though the entirety of their high school probably knows what Tony orders, because he drinks coffee at every available opportunity, including occasional showers.

Tony nods again. “Thanks. I guess. What’s that?”

There’s a heavy pause before Steve says slowly, “Hot chocolate.”

Tony holds his gaze for a few seconds to gauge if he’s joking, and his mouth starts to twitch upwards again.

“I don’t like coffee,” Steve mumbles into his cup.

“You work in a _coffee shop_ ,” Tony says, his shoulders shaking from holding in his laughter, and slots his hand over his mouth, setting his cup down. “Oh, god. I’m not laughing at you, I’m just- you work in a coffee shop, you make _really good coffee_ , and you don’t _like_ it?”

Steve shrugs. “My parents are huge coffee fiends. I grew up knowing how to make a mocha latte.” He prompts this with a sip of his hot chocolate, which sends Tony into barely-controlled laughter again. “I hated it, but whatever. Besides, I like how coffee smells.”

“But not how it _tastes_ ,” Tony chokes, his eyes creasing.

“I’d rather drink engine oil,” Steve says curtly, and Tony has to wait a few seconds, shoulders shaking into silence. By the time he’s stopped laughing quietly into his hands, Steve is staring at him with an expression which he hastily tries to cover when Tony catches it, and then they’re both staring and it’s sort of creepy except really, really not.

Tony swallows, and Steve’s eyes flicker down to his throat for a second before going back up to his face.

“You’re odd,” Tony says, trying to crack a smile, trying to steer the conversation into something that won’t crash and burn and end up in him monumentally embarrassing himself, and clears his throat for what has got to be the millionth time this morning.

 _Safe topics,_ he thinks. _Come on. You can totally do this_.

“So, you kissed me.”

 _Screw you, brain. Screw you and all that you stand for. Especially my mouth, which says awkward things and SCREW YOU, BRAIN_.

Steve’s gaze bolts down to his mug. “I- not last night.”

“I know, I wasn’t that drunk.” Tony bites the inside of his cheek, wishing he could swallow it: _so, you kissed me,_ cavalier and throwaway like he was saying _it’s raining again_ instead of _the condom broke_ , which requires the same kind of urgency he feels should have been used with ‘so, you kissed me.’

“It’s not a big deal,” Tony says, and thinks of Darcy’s tired eyes on the bus. “We were high, I’m obviously gorgeous, and knowing me, I probably made a move on you first.”

“You didn’t,” Steve says, frowning. “And even if you did, that wouldn’t be any excuse t- anyway, I just, um. I’m sorry. I don’t want things to be awkward.”

“If it helps, I can’t remember the actual kiss.”

“That’s… good, then?” Steve still has that face, like something stepped on a baby right in front of him. And then kicked it a bit for good measure.

For lack of things to do, Tony takes another drag of his coffee. And even though he has a cup in his hands, he has a burning for a cigarette to slide in between his fingers.

It’s then that he realizes that he’s probably addicted. He’s been warned about that happening, and he’s known that it was going to happen eventually, but until now he’s brushed it off. Bother.

He wets his lips, tasting more coffee than salt and vomit. None of them are a good combination.

Sucking in a breath, imagining smoke, he thinks: _shit, I’m deep enough in it already, I might as well ask him._

“Was it a good kiss?”

Steve looks stuck for a second, ducking his head and struggling for something to say, and finally manages, “It was- um, okay? I mean, we were both drunk- I mean, you were, but we were high, and- I know you don’t like me,” he says in a rush, his eyes trained on the contents of his mug. “Like that, I mean.”

For all intents and purposes, Tony thinks back to the playgrounds: how everyone always denied it tooth and nail, blocking their ears and stalking away from the slides and screaming _I don’t like them, shut up, you don’t know anything, you’re stupid_ , like having a crush is a weakness and must be snuffed out. Like the very idea of liking someone was this secret, festering thing that you had to shove away. Because they might not like you back, they might like your friend instead, they might think you’re an idiot for saying you like them; or a litany of other reasons that you hold in your fist and don’t let anyone see until it’s too late.

And Tony is already neck-deep in things that he shouldn’t say but ended up saying anyway, so he doesn’t give himself time to think when he says, “Why?”

Steve looks up, but only for a second. He glances a lot- snippets of them, eyes flickering towards him and then away, moth-like.

“Why what?”

“Why don’t you think I like you like that?”

Again, Steve digs for words, mouth opening and closing uselessly. He looks kind of disappointed, actually, and Tony is sorely regretting bringing this up.

“You, uh. You don’t flirt with me? And you flirt with everyone. I mean, not that you- it’s perfectly okay to-”

“I can’t flirt with you,” Tony says, a knee-jerk reaction, and Steve’s expression twists.

Tony backtracks, putting his cup down too hard and almost sloshing coffee over his hand: “I don’t- I can’t flirt with you, like, I literally _can’t_. I’m physically incapable. Like, if it’s you and me alone in a room, and- and I look at you, and- my brain just goes more screwy than usual. And usually when I ramble it’s, like, _sophisticated_ rambling that makes sense most of the time, and I can make it sound at least party witty and knowledgeable and right now I’m really hungover and all I want to do is go home and collapse in bed for the next week or so, and I look at you, and-”

 _Shut up_ , he thinks. _Let it go. Stab yourself with that plastic fork if it stops you talking, Jesus fucking Christ._

He swallows shakily. “And who says I can’t like you like that? I can like you like that if I want to. I like you,” he says, and he’s shrugging, and a kindergartener could’ve said it better, and Steve is looking at him with wide eyes, and Tony could say anything now, couldn’t he?

He could tell Steve that he dreams about him, sometimes: not just full-frontal stuff, but holding hands and falling asleep on the couch together and doing all sorts of stupid, sappy things that always had Tony waking up reaching for a bottle to either drink or throw at a wall. That sometimes, he doesn’t ditch just to see the back of Steve’s head during class. That one time Steve had given his pen back after Biology, and Tony was supposed to feel powerful like that, looking down while Steve was looking up, but Tony looked at the freckle cutting through Steve’s eyebrow and felt dwarfed.

And Steve is still staring, and Tony swallows again, his eyes tracking.

“I like how you- are.”

 _A round of applause for Tony’s brain, ladies and gentlemen_ , he thinks to himself, and very seriously considers, again, stabbing himself with the plastic fork on the table next to him.

“You like how I am,” Steve repeats slowly, like you would talk to someone who was either mentally stunted, or at the age where it’s socially acceptable to walk naked around a department store.

Tony says, “Yep,” and honestly, screw showers, he would rather swim through a pit of rabid lions while lathered in raw antelope meat than stay here and embarrass himself further. Which, ironically, was the very thing he had set out not to so when he had started talking.

He pushes his seat out and makes a show of stretching, long and languid. “We-e-ell, I’d say that’s enough confrontation of my inner things today! I’m going to go home, shower and then- die,” he finishes, and starts towards the door, cup still in hand. He swallows the rest of it without taking a breath, which makes his head swim more than it already is, and puts it down on the counter as Steve says, “Hey, wai-”

“Thanks for the coffee, it was great, although you wouldn’t know because apparently you hate it for some weird, probably psychological reason, because everyone likes coffee and half of the people I know can’t function without it,” Tony blurts, and he’s out the door and out of earshot by the time he’s halfway through the sentence.

 

He texts Darcy on the bus, after standing at the bus stop and getting rained on so hard that it almost washed away the salt: _sorry I ditched you, stuff came up_.

He walks back to his house without bothering to cover his head. When he gets to his house, he has his keys out, but the door is unlocked.

A jolt runs through him and he half-drunkenly thinks, _fuck, burglar_ , and looks around the porch for something to defend himself with.

He settles for an inflatable poodle- partly deflated- that Clint got him as a gag gift for his fourteenth birthday, stares at it for a second, and then shoves it in back under the bush where he picked it up from.

He flips open his phone, his thumb hovering over the ‘9,’ and pushes the door open slowly.

Nothing’s broken- no couches upturned, no TV mysteriously missing. Everything seems to be in the right place, and for a second he thinks _ooookay, I left the door open because I’m a freaking moron and started out the day drooling over a toilet bowl at 2 in the morning_ , before he spots the tie hanging over the back of a kitchen chair.

It doesn’t click until he looks over and sees his dad’s bedroom door wedged open slightly, and Tony suddenly doesn’t know what to do with himself.

It registers the way someone slicing their hand open while cooking dinner would register it: they’d see the blood, and then the pain would kick in, hot and sharp.

He blinks at his dad’s door, at the tie, and thinks back to his last Christmas where he had woken up with a fragile expectation that his dad had gotten a flight out, but walking into an empty lounge with no extra presents under the tree and his dad’s door firmly closed, and wonders why his dad didn’t just get a hotel instead of coming here.

It’s noon- well, noon-ish, about ten in the morning, so close enough- but suddenly Tony is more tired than he was ten minutes ago, which puts his energy from wanting-to-sleep-for-a-week to wanting-to-close-his-eyes-and-not-wake-up-until-they-invent-robot-butlers, because robot butlers will never disappoint him on Christmas. In his theory of robot butlers, at least.

He stands there, keys in hand and phone in the other, for what feels like a long time.

After a while, his vision starts to blur from not blinking for too long, and he drops his gaze. He walks to the bathroom, dropping everything on the floor as he does, sheds his clothes, turns the shower on and gets in while it’s still warming up.

He washes his hair, doesn’t bother shaving and is out in under five minutes, wrapping a towel around his waist and leaving all his clothes on the tiles. He pointedly avoids looking at the tie or the door as he makes his way through the lounge to his bedroom, where he pulls on a pair of clean sweatpants and a not-so-clean t-shirt and slides into bed, pulling the covers over his eyes.

Exhaustion wrecks its way through him, layer upon layer, and he’s asleep before he can remember why he’s so tired in the first place.


	17. Chapter 17

Darcy sucks in a crisis. She has always sucked in a crisis, and she doesn’t see that changing as she scrabbles with her cell phone again after hanging up on the ambulance, when they’ve assured her that they’ll get there as fast as they can.

Which in Darcy’s opinion is not fast enough, because she’s close to hyperventilating and Bruce isn’t looking much better, which is still about a thousand times better than how Clint looks right now.

She stabs in Tony’s number, and shoves the phone to her ear. Every ring makes her teeth clench.

“Maybe we should go wait outside so the ambulance sees us,” Bruce says, and his voice sounds less like a wire pulled to breaking point than it did a minute ago. Actually, apart from the initial shock, he’s sort of… calm. Collected. Like he’s already put himself back together.

“Yeah,” Darcy agrees, although there’s something morbid about leaving Clint here alone.

On the other end of the phone, Tony says, “Hello?”

Darcy may or may not lean a bit into the phone, relief bleeding into her voice before she realizes it and is able to suck it out. “Tony, shit, hi. So, we’re-”

There’s the tinny sound of Tony’s laugh, the one he does when he’s exceptionally trashed, and she faintly remembers being with him when he had recoded this a few months ago.

Then he’s saying, “Joking, sorry! Yeah, yeah, I know, I’m a dick, but you love me. This is Tony’s phone, obvio-”

“You fucking wouldn’t,” Darcy says, dazed.

“-o leave a message after the beep.”

 _Beep_.

Darcy is momentarily stuck between blind rage and the urge to burst out laughing until she starts crying. “ _Fuck_ you,” she says, less steady than she should, and Bruce looks over at her.

“ _Fuck_ you, oh my god, I _hate_ you, fucking fuckedy fuck fucking _shit_. It’s me, answer your fucking phone, Clint’s-” her throat catches on it, like she swallowed something with an edge to it. “-he’s, uh, hurt. And I really fucking hate you right now, and the ambulance is on its way, so meet us at the hospital, okay? Just- god, you never check your fucking voicemail, you stupid fucking-”

She stops, her lips tightening, and tightens the phone in her fist for a few seconds, pressing it against her forehead. Bruce’s hand is at her shoulder, squeezing slightly, like she’s the one who needs to be comforted instead of the brother of the guy who’s barely conscious on the ground.

She thinks about trying that ‘counting to ten’ thing that she’s heard about, and then feels like an idiot for even considering it and brings the phone up again. “I still hate you. We’ll be at the hospital. Not that you’ll ever hear this.”

Then she’s talking to a dial tone, and her fingers shake as she scrolls through her contacts, down to ‘P.’

Pepper’s cell rings nine times, and Darcy hangs up when she hears the practiced: “This is Pepper Pott’s phone, please leave a message,” the voice message that responsible people record and that Tony should do if he wasn’t sixteen and an asshole with a total of zero responsibilities.

Up to ‘S,’ and Steve answers on the fourth ring.

“Hel-”

“Clint is bleeding on the floor and blood is really fucking hard to get out of the carpet and Tony isn’t answering his phone and neither is Pepper and I’m sort of freaking the fuck out and Bruce is weirdly calm and when Tony is hungover he can sleep for like twelve hours straight and he’d want to know about Clint so can you pick him up and come to the hospital please please _please_.”

Understandably, Steve takes a second to answer, but when he does, it’s at least semi-calm and it makes Darcy sag.

“I’m on it. What happened?”

Darcy has her fingers in her hair, but it doesn’t smell like salt anymore. It doesn’t smell like that cranberry shampoo that was in the back of the shop. It smells sort of like rain, the way she imagines rain to smell like. And she’s trying to imagine what rain smells like, and whether or not it would be like she thought it did when she had stuck her head out of the window when was eleven after it had rained for three weeks straight: damp and soggy and sort of heavy with blunt bits of lightning in it, so she almost misses Steve’s answer.

It catches up to her as she’s in the middle of saying, “What?”

“What happened to Clint,” Steve asks, and Darcy’s breathing is coming slower now, in sips instead of gulps.

There are dots of blood over the carpet, scattered around Clint’s head: a bloody, inverted halo that arcs off to the side, and it makes Darcy imagine something shattering into his cheek.

Then a hand is gently uncurling her fingers from around her phone, and she looks up and Bruce apologizes quietly to her as he puts her phone up to his ear.

Darcy sort of starts drifting as Bruce starts explaining things to Steve- quiet, levelled, like he’s done this before. On the other side of the door the dog is whining, scratching occasionally at the bottom of the wood.

Darcy leans heavily on the wall, steeping her fingers in a way that apparently makes her look like her cousin, and stares at Clint. She doesn’t go over and touch him like she half-wants to, because she read somewhere that you’re not supposed to touch someone if they’re as badly hurt as he is, or something.

Not that they know how badly he’s hurt, anyway- but his face is contorted, a mess of his own swollen skin, and it’s bright and violent and there is a cluster of tiny slivers of glass under the shell of his left ear, and suddenly all she can think of is looking up at the blossoms and how fucking hard it is to get blood out of the carpet- even when you try to scrub, unless you get some peroxide or some kind of bleach-y shit, it always leaves a coffee-like stain.

It occurs to her again that she sucks in a crisis, and that she has absolutely no idea what to do in this situation, mostly because she hasn’t been in a situation like this before.

And Bruce’s hand is at her shoulder again, saying her name, and how the fuck is he so calm?

“Why the fuck are you so calm,” Darcy manages, and later, she thinks that the fact that she hadn’t figured it out by then was probably a tell-tale sign to how blearily she had been thinking.

He just looks at her, his jaw working, before taking her hand and pushing her phone back into it. “Steve and Tony will meet us at the hospital.”

Darcy nods, clinging to her phone with both hands. _Wow, I am so incredibly horrible at this,_ she thinks numbly.

“Should I call your mom, or are you going to tell her at the hospital?”

Bruce’s eyebrows flicker together for a second. “What?”

“Your mom works there, right? As a nurse?”

“Oh. No. I mean, yes, but she’s been at the clinic for a few weeks now.”

“Okay, I’ll ca-”

His hand covers hers before she can get into her contacts, and when she looks at him, his expression has a bit more flight in it. As in, fight or flight.

At the moment, Darcy isn’t a ‘flight,’ but she’s not doing so well in ‘fight,’ either- her palms are sweating now, and they haven’t done that since she third grade, when she had to come out of gym class after publically humiliating Jessie Crowe, which is only something you want to do if you want to get lunchboxes thrown at your head every break for the next week.

She remembers how Clint had taken the hits every time he could, and doesn’t understand how he got from glaring at someone across the playground to lying facing the ceiling with tiny wedges of glass under his ear, his chest coming up and down in short jerks.

Bruce’s grip loosens on the phone and he looks down, wetting his lips. “I don’t- she has enough to worry about, okay? We can tell her after.”

“After what?” Darcy’s voice is running itself dry; fraying at the edges. “We don’t know how bad it is! He could be in a coma, blood coming out of his mouth means it’s a brain injury, right-”

“Or he could have bit his tongue, or it could just be blood from- somewhere else,” Bruce says. “He’s conscious, sort of, so he might just be concussed. It’ll be fine.”

And Darcy must have let out some embarrassing sort of muffled sobbing noise, because she hears one and Bruce sure as hell didn’t make it, and his hands come up to cover hers again. “It’ll be fine, Darcy.”

Darcy thinks, _I should be the one comforting you, what the fuck_ , and goes from _comfort_ to the way she usually comforts people, to leaning forwards, and- and-

And Bruce is leaning away even quicker than she’s leaning in, his hands on her shoulders to keep her still. “What are you doing?”

Darcy honest to god cannot come up with a better answer than, “…Comforting you? I mean, we’re both freaked out- you’re not showing it, but obviously you have to be, and-”

“I’m not going to- to kiss you when we’re waiting for an ambulance to pick up my half-conscious brother who could be concussed or comatose,” Bruce blurts, giving another meaning to ‘deer in the headlights,’ his hands still on her shoulders and not pushing, but not pulling her in and shoving his tongue down her throat like Darcy expected him to.

“And,” Bruce says, looking like it’s taking a huge effort to keep eye contact through this, “you’ve never liked me as anything more than a friend, and barely even that.”

Darcy stares. Here is this boy standing in front of her, the heat of his hands seeping through her sleeves, saying what all of them have avoided saying for years like it doesn’t hurt.

She looks away, towards Clint, and it comes out in a humourless laugh: “Jesus _fuck_ , what the fuck am I supposed to say to that? I apologize not seeing you like that?”

She waves her hands, which almost hit him in the face because they’re officially in each other’s personal bubbles. “Oops, I don’t want to ride your dick, sorry-”

Bruce blanches. “I don’t- you- oh, god, you’re not _obligated_ -”

“Why can’t friends just do things occasionally? Like make out! Why can’t friends make out? Because we’re _friends_ , okay, whether you fucking like it or not. It’s- it’s nice and it makes both participants feel good, and-”

“If you don’t-”

“What the fuck is wrong with you, anyway? Hot girl with great boobs offers you her tongue on a plate, you go for it! And that- sounded really fucking gruesome, holy shit, but my point is-”

Clint drags in a rattling breath and the both of them fall silent, watching the halting movements of his chest jerking up and down.

Bruce sucks in a loud breath, and it’s nothing as stilted as his brother’s. “We should go-”

“Wait outside,” Darcy finishes. “Yeah.”

 

Tony has been woken up in a lot of ways. He’s been splashed with water, and on one occasion with vodka, when Darcy had been pissed with him. He’s been yelled at, jumped on, shoved off a couch, etc, etc-

One way he hasn’t been woken up, though, is by a strangely arousing voice saying in a hushed tone that means he’s been saying it for a few minutes now, “Tony? Tony, can you-”

Then there’s a warm hand on his shoulder, shaking gently, and Tony turns his face towards said hand without thinking about it.

The hand slips away as soon as his nose nuzzles into it, and Tony moans into his pillow and is about to ask for it back when he realizes that a hand usually means that there’s a person attached to it.

He bolts up, trying to grab for a pillow, before he connects the voice to the face and oh, motherfucking _shitballs_ -

“You are very much in my room,” Tony says, pillow lofted, his tongue lagging so it comes out sloppily.

“I am,” Steve says, equally slowly, but Tony thinks it’s because he’s dealing with a still-slightly-drunk guy who is making next to no sense and has dried drool caked to the side of his cheek.

He reaches up to scrub said drool off in the most dignified way he can (which isn’t very dignified at all), wiping his hand on his sheets. “Why are you very much in my room?”

“Darcy called,” Steve says, and his posture straightens. “Something happened to Clint, and she’s going to meet us at the hospital. With Bruce.”

Tony sits up properly, moving to get off the bed, suddenly less aware of how underdressed for anything he looks right now. There’s a low buzz of panic running through him, but he pushes it back.

“What happened?”

“I don’t know, but as far as Bruce can tell me, it’s pretty bad.”

“Then what are we waiting for?” Tony sits back down on the bed to shove his boots on, bare-footed, hyper-aware of the fact that less than twelve hours ago, he had said ‘I like how you are,’ which, right now, is turning out to be the bane of his existence.

He fiddles with his zips- his right boot has always been tricky since he almost ripped it last year. “To the batmobile. Or the bus, whatever.”

“I drove my boss’s car, we can, uh, take that,” Steve says, sounding distracted, and when Tony looks at him, he’s glancing around the room.

His gaze lands on the photos on the desk: the family photo back in London in their old backyard, when mum had been eight weeks away from leaving and when dad always came home at six. Tony is caught in between them, grinning, buck-toothed and sunburned, and Tony has never been able to bring himself to throw it out yet.

Then there’s unframed print-out of Clint, Darcy and Tony posing in front of a cardboard figure of Alan Rickman. They’re all half-bent over, frozen laughter that you don’t get to keep otherwise, and Clint is less than a second away from spilling his drink down Tony’s pants. In the photo, his fingers are loosening on it.

The old poster of a movie he stopped liking when he was thirteen that he can’t be bothered to get down because it’s a gazillion miles up the wall and he’d have to get a chair; his unmade bed with the duvet thrown off, the spare change sprawled on his desk, the Biology homework that he’s neglected to do, the clothes in heaps on his floor, the zombie mask from last Halloween with a broken strap, the empty clothes hanger twisted into absent shapes and poking out from under a pair of jeans that need a wash- they’re all laid out for Steve to see, and he’s looking over all of them.

Tony feels oddly naked, like, _fuck, what does that empty soda can on my windowsill say about my personality and/or psyche?_

Mostly to distract Steve without having to throw a pillow at him, Tony clears his throat and says, “So, you can drive?”

“What?” Steve’s eyes are on the photos again, but Tony can’t tell which one. “Yeah, I got my licence a few months ago.”

“Super duper,” Tony says, and sometimes he really wants to slap himself. Like, a good hard slap, right across the face. Repeatedly.

Steve nods, and lingers on the photos for a few more seconds before looking back over to him and saying, “To the Stevemobile.”

It doesn’t register for a while, and by then Tony is still staring at him.

A dent appears in the corner of Tony’s mouth, and he quickly folds his bottom lip into his mouth, because if he doesn’t he’s going to burst out laughing and he shouldn’t be laughing if they’re driving to the hospital.

“To the Stevemobile,” Tony repeats, being careful not to do something stupid like trip and fall onto Steve’s mouth as he passes him.

He’s almost at the front door when he stops, looking into the kitchen- the coffee pot is almost empty, and it was completely empty the last time he had checked.

He turns, looking past Steve and towards his dad’s bedroom- the tie is gone from the couch, and the door is firmly shut. Nothing else is touched except for the coffee-pot.

Steve doesn’t move into his line of sight, but he shifts forwards, like he’s going to take a step. “You okay?”

Tony imagines his dad- probably fatter around the middle, probably shaven and caffeinated, probably not looking through Tony’s door to check up on him- leaving, stepping quietly and closing the door softly behind him.

He thinks of Clint and Darcy’s parents all slamming doors, screaming as they do it, thinks of how the sudden jolt of noise would have woken him up, and thinks of his teacher saying to him once, _Tony, you are the goddamn personification of a slammed door_ , which he didn’t get then, doesn’t get now and doesn’t want to at any time in the near future.

He doesn’t know whether to be disappointed or relieved, and as he looks at the coffee pot the only thing that comes to mind is, ‘well, what the hell were you expecting?’

And he should know better by now, now that he thinks about it, he realizes he was at least expecting a goodbye.    

 

Steve is a decent driver- better than Clint and Pepper, worse than Darcy, and doesn’t turn on the radio at any point, which Tony finds weird, because without it is just awkward silence that gets considerably more awkward as the ride continues.

Halfway there, when they’re stopped at a red light, Tony is tempted to start humming. Anything to break the silence, because good _lord_ -

“Nice lights. Come on. Goooood lights.”

Tony looks over at him and Steve abruptly falls silent, staring at the traffic lights intently in a way that makes Tony think he just realized there’s another person in earshot.

There’s a short silence, where the left indicator clicks softly and Steve doesn’t even glance at him.

Tony nods to himself, still looking at him. “You talk to the traffic lights.”

“Sometimes,” Steve replies stiffly, eyes still firm on them.

“Does it make them go faster?”

“Sometimes.”

Unlike Darcy, Tony isn’t a Richard Siken fan- not even a closet one- but suddenly he’s thinking of that one line that Darcy has the page folded over on, the one that she says is overused to the point where it should be uselessly shitty, but somehow manages not to be.

And Tony keeps looking at him: Steve Rogers, framed by the sheets of rain outside the window with his mouth parted; his long, wide hands around the steering wheel in the exact opposite way that Tony learned it. Steve, who hates coffee and can legally drive and talks to traffic lights, and Tony wants to know him down to how he blinks himself awake in the morning.

He nods again, sharp, and turns to the traffic lights. “Come on, you piece of shit lights. You can move faster than that. My grandma can move faster than you. No, my _microwave_ can move faster than you.”

There’s a huff of laughter, light and soft. “He didn’t mean that,” Steve says, and when Tony glances at him, he gets stuck on how Steve’s jaw shifts under his skin.

“You can do it,” Steve says to the lights, and Tony watches the smooth glide of it. “Good lights. We believe in you, lights.”

“You’re a tragic disgrace to your kind and all that is technology,” Tony says, tearing his eyes away, “including soap dispensers.”

“Just take your time, lights.”

“It’s not like we have anywhere to be, you shitty, half-assed-”

The lights flicker to green and Tony whoops, punching the air the best he can without grazing his fist on the roof. “ _Hell_ yes, I win.”

Steve leans down slowly on the accelerator, glancing over at him as the car pushes forwards. “I see you’re a fan of tough love.”

“It gets the job done,” Tony says, and a grin is making its way up his face, caving his cheeks.


	18. Chapter 18

Everyone he’s ever told this has looked at him strangely, but Bruce has always liked hospitals.

There are always things happening in them- granted, most of them involve gurneys and vomit and some dumb teenagers doing dumb things that result in an unscheduled skip to the ER.

And then there’s the paediatrics ward, and people who have been here for months, and all the people with cancer building up so you get to see everyone in slow stages of deterioration, none of which is fun for anyone. Then the overall dead/dying feel to the place, where the nurses are all fake smiles and exhausted reassurances that they’ve been pulling for 42 hours straight without sleep, and every room reeks of bleach and old people.

But all in all, Bruce likes it if you take away the things that make everyone collectively flinch. And the fact that it sort of stings his nostrils if he breathes in too hard through his nose.

Because then there’s the straight-cut, equally folded sheets. Then there’s the measured, monotonous voice over the PA. Then there are the lights that stay the same in every single room. Then there’s the half-remembered memory of riding a gurney with Clint down a deserted hall and clinging onto the rails for dear life, yelling for their dad to push it faster, and their dad picking up the pace.

Clint had been cheering, their mom had been in the background telling them to slow down, their dad had been saying over his shoulder not to be such a stick in the mud, and for a long time, Bruce remembered those joined sounds as ‘home.’

That had been when they used to visit their mom at the hospital sometimes, a while before school had started and long before mom started taking more nightshifts and everyone started drinking and their dad’s ring started splitting their cheek on impact.

Anyway, hospitals have always seemed more like home than they should be, and Bruce likes them, for all their messed up simplicity, all their fake-ness and all their plastic over the sheets.

It’s a different case when his twin brother is in a hospital bed and everyone is sitting in flimsy chairs around the walls of the room, listening to him breathe.

Naturally, it’s Tony who finally breaks the silence. “So, Beef, huh? More like ‘mince.’”

Darcy shoves him, but visibly relaxes, tension bleeding from her shoulders. “Shut the fuck up. That was terrible.”

Tony shoves her back just as hard, shoulder to shoulder. “I’m making an observation! His face is all…”

He waves his hand in the vague direction of Clint’s face, which indeed slightly resembles mince.

The blood was been cleaned off, so it looks less dramatic than it did when they found him, but there are several stitches under his ear where there was glass, and two along the line of his forehead, just where his part of his hair starts. He has a split lip that’s three times as bad as Tony’s and covering twice the radius, slicing deep. Apart from that, most of his face is an angry red; puffy except for a few small patches, and the old bruise looks dull in comparison.

It’s not serious- bruising, some stitches and a minor concussion, they can take him home when he wakes up, the doctor had said, and then, “Have you notified your parents, or-”

“It’s taken care of,” Bruce had said, and didn’t look at Darcy when she glanced at him. “Thank you, doctor.”

Steve keeps looking over at him- solid, but with a worried crease in his eyebrows that he can’t force down. So far, Bruce’s managed to avoid it, but he knows that when Steve gets him alone, he’s going to get something out of him.

Steve shifts in his seat, his arms flexing where they’re crossed over each other, and Bruce is expecting Tony to blatantly stare at them like he always does, but Tony’s eyes just flicker over them and stay on Steve’s face for a few seconds before dragging away.

 _Huh_ , Bruce thinks. _That’s… interesting?_

There’s a scrape of a chair, and Bruce tenses as Steve shifts again, his legs stretching out.

“So, Bruce,” he says, meeting his eyes, and Bruce wants to shut them- the lights are suddenly too bright, the machines are suddenly too loud; blaring down at him.

“Can I talk to you outside?”

 _No, fuck off_. “Sure.”

It’s not often that Bruce gets looked at- maybe when he has his own bruise, or when he’s doing something particularly stupid, which usually involves Tony- but when it happens, he always feels a prickle at the back of his neck.

The back of his neck is going fucking insane as he follows Steve out of the room, even though it’s only Tony and Darcy that are left looking at him as he does.

He closes the door with a quiet click and turns to face Steve, who still has his arms folded.

“Are you going to tell us what happened, or do we have to assume things again?”

“I wasn’t there,” Bruce says, and it comes out flat; rehearsed. “Darcy wanted to check on him to see if he was okay after the party, so we bussed over. The car was in the driveway. He was like that when we found him.”

Steve stares at him. “What, are you giving a statement to the police? It’s me, why-”

“It’s none of your business.”

Bruce watches things. Bruce watches people, he always had, he’s always drawn back and kept a lookout and _noticed_. His whole life, he’s been that guy in the background, and he’s fine with it, really. He’s been the guy to lean on, the guy to bitch to and sit at the back and not have anyone look at him unless there’s a huge fucking bruise over his eye, and when that happens, he doesn’t want the attention, anyway.

So for most people, he knows where to twist the knife.

And since he’s known Steve practically forever, it’s not hard to know where to press where it’s going to hurt.

He says, _it’s none of your business,_ and watches his best friend’s face start to close off. His arms are already folded, still flexing when he moves, and for some reason it pisses Bruce off more than it should.

“It is my business,” Steve says, ever-stubborn. “Bruce, come on, we’re worried. You can tell m-”

“My dad gets drunk and hits us,” Bruce says, and it’s a slap to say it out loud for once. It’s that moment where your head breaks the surface and you take a huge gulp of air after staying under for too long. It’s big, and it’s distracting, and Steve’s lips tighten, his eyes widen, but Bruce keeps going.

“It’s not a big deal, and half of the time Clint wants to get hit. We’re handling it, and it’s fine. Stop fucking asking about it.”

He ends it with more force than he means to, something jagged seeping into his voice, and his shoulders are shaking.

They hold each other’s gaze with over-glossy eyes and stiff jaws, and when Steve finally looks away Bruce can’t manage to count it as a victory.

“I’m your friend,” Steve says, and there’s something brutally raw about how he says it. He meets his eyes again, and Bruce realizes why they’ve stayed friends through all of this.

“We’re your friends,” Steve says, eyes and voice and shoulders steady, “and we’re not going to think any less of you for anything.”

Out of nowhere, he remembers when they were both full of edges; skinny joints and floppy hair and adam’s apples that didn’t poke out, and Bruce lagging behind in cross country so Steve didn’t have to be alone at the finish line, behind everyone else.

He thinks of how Steve always wheezed, _just go, Bruce, you could’ve finished this ten minutes ago_.

Every time, Bruce had shrugged _. I’d rather stick with you_.

And that’s what it’s about, right? Having someone to run beside you at the back, and help you up when you skin your knees.

Then, afterwards, he and Steve would lie on the field, panting, arms angled out over their heads, and they would wash the mud out of their scrapes.

They both startle when the door opens, and Darcy half-steps out.

“He’s awake,” she says, and lingers for a second before ducking back in.

Both Steve and Bruce get muddled in the doorway trying to get in, and Bruce leans back and says, “Ladies first,” without thinking about it.

Steve’s smile is tiny, but it’s there. “Well, go.”

It’s shaky ground, and he knows it. But Bruce shoves him lightly, and he shoves back, and Bruce thinks of Darcy and Tony and how they shove but stay for a while after, shoulders pressing together.

 _I’d rather stick with you_ , he thinks, and wonders how many things that can be applied to, and to what extent.

And for the second time this week, he thinks of that damn poem that keeps coming back to him, bit by bit- that line near the end, right before the gut-punch.

He looks down at his twin brother’s eyes, which are identical to his and are slitting open through the swelling, and remembers copying the line down on his hand:

‘There are many things/ that bruises fade from/ And you are not/ one of them.’

 

For the fourth time this week Pepper wonders why the fuck she even took up this career, because everything sucks and it’s all because 90% of her clients are morons who need to sort their shit out, and right now she’s stuck in her shitty office trying to talk to a fourteen year old with a greasy smile who has tried to make a pass at her twice in the last ten minutes.

“Oi,” she says, and snaps her fingers just in front of his nose. “Face. Eyes on my _face_. You know, the other round thing other than my- admittedly, spectacular- breasts.”

Justin Something-or-rather blinks, and leans back in his chair. “Sure, babe. You were saying?”

_I was saying that I’m slightly out of your league, you poor, misguided vat of seething hormones._

“I was saying that your sessions over, Justin. I’ll see you next week.”

“You betcha,” Justin says, and- for the love of god- gives her a finger-gun, making a clicking noise with the side of his mouth and winking at her as she does it.

She waits until the door is closed behind him to roll her eyes, and picks up her snowglobe, tossing it gently and then catching it with the opposite hand.

It wasn’t a present from her darling dead mother that she vowed to keep always to treasure her memory, or anything- she had brought it on a whim at some crappy gift shop at a zoo of some old town that she can’t remember the name of, after sleeping with a guy that she can’t remember the name of, because she wanted to get the shop assistant who was missing a nametag to stop bugging her.

It’s comforting, anyway- the weight of it is always the same, the terrifying expressions of the plastic creatures inside are always the same, and the weird plastic snow is always the same.

She turns it over- she picked off the sticky-tag a few years ago, like she does with everything else- and almost drops it when her phone rings.

She flips it open- apparently she has a missed call, but she’ll look up on that later. “Hey Tony, what’s crack-a-lacking?”

There’s a beat of silence before Tony says, “Never again, oh my fucking god. Never say that again while we both have ears.”

She leans back in her chai and props her feet up on her desk, feeling looser already. “And in what hypothetical situation would we both lose our ears?”

“Something involving an exotic Indian tribe, I’m sure.”

“And why would we be in the presence of an exotic Indian tribe?”

“Because we’d be in India, duh.”

Despite his words, can hear a bite of worry somewhere at the middle.

She rolls the snowglobe in one hand, into the fleshy part of her palm. “And how fare thee wonderful Tony this lovely day?”

“I fare awesome, gracious Pepper.”

She listens as he obviously tries to hedge his way into saying what he called to say, and after a few seconds of it, she sighs. “Okay, out with it.”

“What?”

“Out with it,” she repeats. “You called to tell me something, or ask me something, and it’s not if you can come over, because you’re fine with asking about that. Did something happen?”

“Ah,” Tony says. “That’s sort of actually what I called to ask, gracious Pepper. I do believe you’re acquainted with Clint-and-or-Beef?”

She nods, because she still hasn’t really harnessed over the notion that people can’t see you when you’re on the phone with them. “Our session was blessedly free of any chair-throwing.”

“Great. Got to love the lack of chair-throwing. So anyway, I was wondering if me and him and a few others could come crash at yours for tonight and Sunday?”

Now that he’s gone out and said it, there’s something about it that reminds her of shipwrecks: his voice with ragged, gaping holes in it; his voice with jutted rocks lining the edges.

She’s always hated the phrase ‘pregnant pause,’ but that’s the only way to describe what happens before she takes a breath in and says, “As long as none of them are notorious chair-throwers, sure. Is this a slumber party? Do I buy nail polish and hair curlers and we can all sit around and talk about boys and braid each other’s hair?”

 _What happened_ , she wants to ask, but she sucks it in and holds it.

Tony’s relief is almost tangible through the phone. “Sadly, no. Just the usual bad movies and popcorn. And sleeping bags, obviously. And, uh. Pain meds?”

 _What the flying fuck did you do?_ “What kind?”

“Tylenol.”

“Certainly doable. Who’s coming? And why, actually?”

Tony clicks his tongue, in a way that she knows he does when he’s stressed. “Me, Clint, Darcy, Bruce and Steve. You’ve met most of them.”

“I’ve seen almost all of them drunk and babbling,” Pepper says, and her mind is whirring over _SteveSteveSteveSteve_. “That Steve guy, that’s whatshisname, right?”

“It is indeed,” Tony says, like he wants to take a running jump out of the next window he comes across. “Do not, under any circumstances, say anything about me to him. Like, nothing. No embarrassing stories, no anecdotes, just- radio silence, okay?”

 _You are so far gone over this kid it’s past funny and is now nestling comfortably in awkward and slightly pathetic_. “Why? Are you afraid that if he finds out your favourite breakfast cereal he’ll get offended and storm out, vowing to never speak to you again under pain of death or otherwise?”

There’s another pause, where Tony lets his breath go in a way that means he’s been holding onto it for a while.

Pepper sighs quietly, looking down at the carpet. It’s worn down where her shoes are, and she’s always thought it was the same way with people: you press hard enough, for long enough, you’re going to leave a dent even if you don’t mean to.

“You okay, wonderful Tony?”

His laugh isn’t broken, but it’s not sewn up the right way, either. “It’s been a very abnormal week, gracious Pepper. I’ll tell you when we get there.”

“Sure,” Pepper says, and wants to put him back together, because he’s ten times the person she was at his age and she doesn’t want to see him in pieces this young.

 _Not yet,_ she’s been thinking for six years now. _Not yet, just give him a while longer, don’t fuck with him for a while longer, don’t pull the wool away from his eyes just yet._

She smiles, forgetting again that people can’t see you through the phone. “Us Brits have got to stick together, remember?”

He hums, low and heavy in his throat, but doesn’t say anything.

And Tony is always, always saying something.

The snowglobe is still in her hands, and she reaches for her car keys with the other. “I’ll be home in fifteen. See you there.”

“Yeah,” Tony says. “Bye.”

She almost walks out of the office with the snowglobe tight in her hand, and it’s not the first time.

 

They all come in and head straight for the food with the fervent and bottomless need that only children, teenagers or very stoned people can pull off.

She does a headcount- Tony is shrugging off his jacket, Darcy has one hand in a bag of crisps on the table, Bruce has grown an inch taller and is folding his jacket next to Tony as he reaches for a crisp that Darcy holds out, and-

“Hi, Miss,” Clint says, nodding at her. His face is a marring of swelling and bruises, and- Christ, are those _stitches_?

Pepper takes it as a token to how fucking great at her job she is that she manages to keep her expression neutral.

“Nice face. Again.”

Clint’s mouth ticks upwards like he hadn’t expected that, and in place of dimples there’s a cherry-red mark that she’s sure will scar.

“And call me Pepper,” she says. “I swear to god, if you call me ‘Miss’ again, I will declare you unstable.”

“She uses that threat a lot,” Tony says, sitting down on the couch next to Darcy and sliding a crisp into his mouth. “Don’t pay attention to it.”

They’re all wet- of course they are, it’s been raining forever now- and they’re dripping over the carpet, over the couch. When they get up, there are going to be soggy indents of their jeans.

“Excuse me, my threats are perfectly legitimate and all-over terrifying, thank you-”

She stops when the last one walks through the door, just as wet as the others and just as gangly. He’s the kind of person who seems tall but isn’t; at about Pepper’s height, or just below it. His hair is pushed back, out of the way, and only barely covering his ears. He’s pale and sort of skinny, especially around the wrists and neck, and all in all reminds Pepper of a very attractive goose.

She very definitely doesn’t find herself thinking, _if I was ten years younger-_

Ignoring Tony’s glare, she moves in and holds out her hand. “Hi! You must be Steve.”

The kid- man- weird blur of the two that she’s never going to get used to seeing- sort of smiles and says, “And you’re Pepper.”

He shakes her hand with a grip that’s only slightly harder than hers, and his fingers go all the way to her wrist.

 _Fuck ‘very attractive goose,’ you’re a swan_ , she thinks, momentarily blindsided by the smile that, if she was ten years younger or he was ten years older, she would now be sucking off his face. “I suppose you’ll be eating everything out of my cupboard, too.”

“And freezer,” Tony says through his mouthful. “You’re always stocked up on ice cream.”

Darcy makes an interested noise beside him, her cheeks bulging, and gets up.

Steve sits down on the floor, leaning on the couch less than an inch away from Tony’s legs- there’s room for another person on the couch other than Darcy, but he doesn’t move. His right elbow is brushing against Tony’s right calf.

Judging by his expression, Tony has noticed this and is starting to internally freak out about it, his mouth in mid-chew for a long second before closing it.

Pepper swallows her smile. “Why didn’t you eat at the hospital?”

Both Bruce and Clint say, “No,” loud enough to make everyone look over at them where they’re sitting on the floor, leaning against the table next to Tony’s feet.

They glance at each other before speaking- brother and brother, one with more scars than the other one, and Clint says, “Have you ever _been_ to a hospital cafeteria? Everything tastes like cardboard.”

“Fair enough,” Pepper says. “And I’ll have you know I’ve spent a considerable amount of time in one, thank you very much. My aunt had cancer back in England when I was a kid, and the whole family used to go over. There was always that awkward silence of ‘you know, if you could hurry up and cork it, we’d have enough money to buy that boat we always wanted.’”

It has the exact effect that she wants it to have: it breaks the ice, and there’s still the quiet out-of-place-ness of being in someone else’s home that you don’t know very well, but it gets them laughing.

Tony moves over for Pepper as she sits down. “So, what’s the verdict?”

From the kitchen behind her, Darcy calls, “Concussion. Feed him pain meds and make sure he doesn’t do any rigorous activity.”

Clint raises a hand, and there are no marks on it. Pepper finds her gaze stays on it for a longer time than it should.

“I’m right here,” he says, and waves that smooth hand. “Guy you’re talking about? Right here.”

“Also,” Darcy continues, ignoring him, “when he sleeps, we need to wake him up. Basically, we need to annoy the fuck out of him every twenty minutes.”

“That,” Pepper says, “I excel at, if I do say so myself. And the ice cream is on the bottom shelf.”

There’s a series of clunks, and then Darcy yells, “Thank you,” and the freezer door closes.

Although the atmosphere is easier, less tight than it was when everyone came in, the air is pinched with all the things that none of them are saying.


	19. Chapter 19

They bring out the blankets, they pull out the couch and argue over the spare bed and have a tug-of-war with the sleeping bag, but around about midnight, they end up sprawled on the couch or against it, watching infomercials and eating Pepper out of house and home.

At around about one in the morning they realize that they haven’t pulled the curtains yet, and Bruce trips over Darcy’s feet climbing over to pull them shut.

“It’s still raining,” he calls back to them as he tugs them closed.

Darcy says, “Duh,” without looking away from the TV.

At two, Pepper is in the middle of wrestling Tony away from the liquor cabinet- Tony is losing despite everyone cheering him on- and she realizes that the reason that Clint seems years lighter is because he’s not wearing the jacket.

At two-thirty, Darcy is snoring on Clint’s shoulder and Steve is getting out pasta from the fridge, because apparently cold macaroni and cheese is the ultimate comfort food that surpasses all other supposed ultimate comfort food.

He pads back to the couch as softly as he can, and eases himself back next to Tony on the couch.

“You are a god,” Tony says, and he’s speaking quietly due to Darcy. “Seriously, I worship at your feet. I’ll build you a temple and sacrifice carbohydrates in your honour.”

“Maybe hold off on the sacrifices for now,” Steve says- Tony didn’t want to get up to go to the fridge because of Bruce, who is half-asleep over one of his legs.

Steve hands him a fork as he peels off the plastic wrap. He pauses to reach around, take the remote from Darcy’s knee and turn off the TV before stabbing a piece of pasta and bringing it to his mouth.

“Hey,” Clint whispers, and bats Steve on the knee. “I was watching that.”

“No, you weren’t,” Tony and Pepper say at the same time, because the infomercials had given way to talk shows where everyone wears sweatpants and nobody shaves, and Clint’s eyes had closed long before that.

Clint shifts to the side a bit before remembering Darcy and freezing. “I was listening to it.”

“No, you weren’t,” Pepper says. “Tony, shove Bruce off, you get the spare room because I like you best.”

Tony motions towards the bowl of macaroni and cheese, which is wedged in between Steve’s knees. “But macaroni and cheese.”

“You can have it for breakfast,” Pepper says, pushing herself up and shaking the pins and needles from her legs. “When the hell did you last have a homemade meal, anyway?”

Tony pauses in where he’s carefully trying to extract Bruce’s left side from his leg. “…January last year-ish?”

He can remember, actually, if he thinks hard about it: Darcy’s house, the day after New Years. They had had baked potato, peas, carrots and steak, and Tony had spilled most of his water over the kitchen floor while reaching over for another helping of potato.

He had said, “shit, sorry,” and then, backtracking: “I mean, sorry? Just sorry. No shit whatsoever. Complete lack of shit here.”

Darcy’s father had pursed his lips, but her mom had laughed, which was where Darcy had got hers from. The laugh, he means. Apparently, with both the Barton-Banner twins and Darcy and her mom, laughs are hereditary.

But until then and since then, due to lack of parental supervision, he’s been living on order-in Chinese and Thai food. Over the years, he’s developed kind of a dependency on it- the sweaty taste when you open it and the steam pours out, the fried-sock sort of quality to it if you leave it in the fridge for too long and it rubberizes when you try to reheat it.

When he gets right down to it, he’s spent about half of the money his dad gives him on getting takeout. Then about a third of the rest of that money on alcohol via a cringingly obvious fake ID that he still gets away with, thanks to the clueless guy who works down at the shop who he might have made out with to get beer for free that one time when he had left his wallet at home.

Which possibly counts as prostitution, but whatever.

He stands his fork up in the macaroni and cheese and gets to his feet, standing still for a second to get used to the numbness in his legs.

Taking a wobbly step over Bruce, who is now more awake than he was a second ago, he waves a hand towards them all. “Night.”

“Night,” Clint and Steve reply, and Bruce grunts something that could probably pass for it.

Tony has that gritty, sand-like quality to his eyes that mean he’s stayed awake too long, and every blink seems heavier than the last one. His feet drag, still numb, and it feels like he’s walking with layers and layers of ocean between his bare feet and the carpet.

Steve is getting the airbed along with Bruce, and he slides down next to him as Tony makes his way across the room to Pepper. Darcy and Clint get the pull-out couch, and the blankets are strewn in messes across all of them.

Tony looks at them, at their softened half-outlines that he can only just make out in the dull light of the only lamp left on, and tries to think of a word for the warm, sugar-crystal rise in his ribs.

He can’t think of one, but he chalks it down to being tired. That, and it’s been a while since he was bored enough to sit in class and read a dictionary.

Tony, for one, has known a lot of people who like things to be labelled. For things and places and feelings to be neatly categorised, folded into place and shoved into drawers. And he likes his share of that just as much as anyone else, but the best things, he has found himself thinking more than once, don’t have names.

They’re sort of vague notions that we can ghost our fingers over, but can never touch. That fleeing feeling that you can’t hold tight enough especially if you grab at it, the one that slips away like water or sand. The one that rushes through you and leaves you breathless, and it’s always been better that no-one can pin it down and find a word for it, because that way it can never settle. That way, it can breeze over us and fill us up until we’re spilling over, and it can either sit there and sing, fat and happy. Or it can be a hot, bright flash, but either way, after it leaves you, you know it was there.

So he looks at them- at Bruce’s eyelids drooping, at Clint trying to lie down without disturbing Darcy, at Steve rearranging a woollen blanket over his black ankle-socks and over Bruce’s knees where his shorts cut off- and he can’t speak, full with that feeling that he has scoured dictionaries for but never found anything, knowing that it’s going to be gone in a second no matter what grip he gets on it.

It coasts through him, electric and hazy up his fingers and his legs and bursting in all directions from his chest, and he clings to it even though it won’t help.

He lets his breath go and it leaves on the exhale, quiet and shaky.

When he turns around again, Pepper is looking at him with an unreadable expression, but there’s something soft in there.

He follows her down the hall into the spare room that he’s only slept in once before, when he was drunk and it was raining and he couldn’t be bothered getting Clint to pick him up or bus home.

Pepper opens the cupboard and takes down a pillowcase from the top shelf and tosses it to Tony, who catches it and reaches for the pillow.

As he slips the pillow case over it, Pepper flops down onto the duvet, facing the ceiling, her legs dangling over the end of the bed.

He sits down next to her, and pushes the pillow into place. “Your room is over the other end of the hall, if you’ve forgotten.”

“For some reason, I seem to remember the room placement in my own house.”

Her hand latches in the back of his shirt, and he lets her drag him down onto his back.

They lie there like that for a while, and the silence starts to press at Tony, along with the nudging urge to just fall asleep there, until he finally says, “Is this you trying to therapize me without me noticing?”

“You’re too smart for that,” Pepper replies. “And ‘therapize’ isn’t a word, nor will it ever be.”

“You’re just racist.”

“What?”

“I’m tired,” Tony says. “My insults don’t have to make sense.”

The quiet comes back to sit in the room, comfortable and easy, and Tony realizes for the umpteenth time that their relationship probably isn’t very healthy at all, and remembers how itchy the couch in her office used to be before everyone broke it in. How whenever he sat in it, it would be warm from some else’s body heat.

He doesn’t take his eyes off the ceiling when he says, “My dad was home. When I got there this morning, I mean.”

She doesn’t say anything. She doesn’t even look at him, but he can feel the prickle of her hair at his shoulder and the heat of her hand next to his.

“I didn’t want to bring them back there,” he says, focusing on the corner of the wallpaper until his vision starts to blur. “It didn’t- he just went into his room, slept, raided the coffee and left. He didn’t leave a note, or-”

Now that he’s saying it out loud, it sort of sounds really, really stupid, so he tells her this, and then says, “And I didn’t want Clint and Bruce to go home to whatever they go home to, and none of us- I don’t know about Steve’s family, actually, but he said he’d go wherever Bruce went, so. And I was standing in front of a vending machine and deciding whether or not to shake it because my food was stuck, but then I thought that hospital vending machines probably have alarms in them, so I was staring at it with my foot kind of angled to kick it. And I started thinking about homes, and how people define them, and- I don’t know, I sort of define mine by the people in it. And that also sounds really stupid now that I say it out loud. Fuck.”

He swallows, blinks so his vision fades back to normal, and keeps going.

“And my house always played a safehouse for Darcy and Clint, but my dad used the fucking coffeepot and now it looks all wrong, and I was getting ready to kick the vending machine and I realized that this is my safehouse. I guess. So, thank you. Uh.”

Pepper is silent for a long time. Then, when Tony is almost ready to assume she fell asleep, she stretches her arms out above her head.

“Did you kick it?”

“What?”

“The vending machine,” she says, eyes on the ceiling. “Did you kick it? Or shake it, whatever.”

“Note to self,” Tony says. “Hospital vending machines have alarms.”

She laughs, deep and throaty and sounding like pine trees, and Tony loves her for it.

She moves her hand down so it’s resting next to his collarbone, and grips it. “You,” she says, “are the only person I’ve ever met who thinks they’re both too much and not enough, simultaneously.”

 

Tony can’t remember where, or even how old he was, but once his mom had been curling her hair around both of their fingers, and hers had seemed huge in comparison.

“Did you know,” she said, “That somewhere, you’re in the background of a stranger’s photo?”

He propped his chin up on her shoulder, nuzzling in, and she laughed. “Tony, pay attention! I’m teaching you an important life lesson. Probably.”

Tony smiled with all the Pepper of a terrier on morphine. That’s to say, not much. “I’m listening.”

“Good,” his mother said, and she smelled like the pears in their backyard, the ones that always reminded him of doves because of their leaves. “Just think about it for a second, okay? Think about everyone who you’ve passed with a camera out, and all the people who have been taking pictures that you’ve walked into without noticing.”

Tony didn’t really understand what she was talking about, but he nodded.

“Now think about how many people have those photos printed out,” she said, her hand curling around his waist. “Or in their wallets, or on their computers. Think about how many people out there in the world, that have photos that they look at everyday, and how many of them are going to have you in it. And none of them even know who you are, or why you were there, or what your name is, but you’re in their photo. Maybe just a slice of you, even,” she said, and Tony had thought of slices of people like slices of cake: big, thick wedges of someone, topped with icing.

She smiled with eyes that looked nothing like Tony’s but had the same shape. “I’ve always loved that. The idea that everyone’s significant, even if it’s just for a photo that your hand got caught in while you were out shopping, or something. That everyone’s important, even if it’s for something stupid and small.”

Tony had looked up at her, at his mother’s thick hair and whipped-cream skin, and she gathered him up in her arms and pressed her lips to his cheek, hard. “Sometimes the stupid, small things are important, okay? Sometimes they’re the most important thing in the world.”

Tony, for once, didn’t know what to say to that except: “Okay.”

A side of her mouth had ticked, and at that point, he hadn’t known what it meant. “Promise me you’ll remember that, Tony?”

“Okay,” Tony said.

Except for once while getting on the plane to America, he forgot it until he was almost twelve and he glanced across a playground, and had seen a boy flipping a shard of garden bark over in his hands.

For some reason, the small, stupid things- the tilt of the sun hitting the boy’s face, the coffee-shade of his eyes and hair, how his mouth shaped a ‘p,’ the quiet brilliance of his goofy smile-suddenly seemed like the most important things in the world again.

 

Everyone wakes up with the slow, syrupy laziness of Sunday, no-one able to think coherently until at least ten in the morning.

When Tony opens the door to the lounge at quarter to midday they’re all up except for Darcy, who has her head buried under a couch cushion with both her arms pressed over it.

He grins, leaning down to pat her head as he passes. “Morning, sunshine.”

“Mmfuck off,” she mumbles into the couch, which is usually the reaction that Tony gets, so he leaves it.

He’s on his way to the cupboard- Pepper only has instant coffee, which tastes like shit but is still coffee, hence drinkable- when he finally locates the smell that hit him when he had walked in.

It takes a few seconds for Clint to notice his raised eyebrows.

“Shut up,” Clint says, flushing, but that could just be from standing over a stove. A stove that happens to have an element on, which happens to have a frying pan with several pikelets in it, which happen to be bubbly nicely. “I was hungry and the toaster is a piece of shit.”

“No offence taken,” Pepper says from the pull-out couch in the lounge, where she has her knees brought up so she doesn’t kick Darcy on the face.

Tony watches the pikelets for a second, fingers itching for the spatula- he was always a backseat cooker, at least he was back in London when he used to cook. “Can mine have chocolate chips in them? Pepper, do we have-”

“We do indeed,” Pepper calls, and pauses to take a mouthful of (horrible, terrible, cheap, shitty) coffee. “Cupboard, next to the coffee.”

“You’re a god,” Tony says, and moves to open the cupboard doors.

He hears cutlery clinking, and Steve says, “Hey.”

Tony bites down on another grin, shuffling through the spices to get to the container of chocolate chips, because Pepper is a weirdo who keeps their chocolate chips in the middle of a packet of coriander and a bottle of cumin. “You’re still a god, Steve. Just a different god. For you, I sacrifice poor, weakling carbohydrates. For Pepper, I’ll sacrifice- what the hell is chocolate made out of?”

“Don’t know, and quite frankly don’t care, just give me chocolate,” Pepper answers. “Clint, are you giving us any?”

“No, I’m going to eat an entire batch of pikelets,” Clint says flatly, and slides the spatula under one of them. He flips it, and it’s a bit burnt on one side, but other than that, it’s pretty decent.

“Actually, pancake mix in pikelet-sized portions,” he says, and his face scrunches. “Panklets?”

Bruce makes a sleepy noise which comes out wide and long. “Chocolate-chip panklets. My favourite. Thanks, my fantastic, wonderful brother whom I love so very much.”

Clint mouths, _whom_ , rolling his eyes, but he’s smiling. “For that, I won’t burn yours. Much.”

“I take it back, I loathe you.”

“You love me,” Clint says, flipping another what-Tony-is-forever-dubbing-as-a-panklet and moving onto the next one, digging his spatula underneath it.

Tony lets his gaze flicker over him- the bruises haven’t gone down, they’re still raised and bright and standing out, but Clint is smiling like it doesn’t aggravate the stitches, so that’s enough.

He places the chocolate chips a safe-ish distance away from the stove, and claps Clint on the shoulder. “Don’t skimp. One can never have enough chocolate.”

Clint says, “Yeah,” and shifts the pan over to the right, sliding panklets onto a plate. “Steve, yours are done. Chocolate-chip free, though.”

Steve stands up and reaches for the plate through the roll-up frame that separates the kitchen from the lounge. He thanks Clint as he tips a handful of chocolate chips into his hand, heaping them on the side of the plate and taking the tea-towel that Clint offers.

“Good hot chocolate?”

Steve glances up at Tony, who is now sort of regretting saying it in the first place, but his lips twitch. “I’m not having any this morning.”

 _Never speak again, ever, ever, ever. Never open your mouth in your lifetime. Just shut up and mime everything until you die._ “Oh. Well. You have chocolate chips instead, so win-win.”

“Win-win,” Steve agrees, and his smile is soft.

Clint mutters something as he empties half of the remaining chocolate chips into the panklet mix, and Tony says, “What was that?”

“That was, ‘I can say anything I damn well want to, Tony, because I’m making you assholes breakfast instead of the woman who is twice our age who should be in here doing it,’” Clint says, tossing Tony the finger over his shoulder.

Darcy finally sits up, wiping her mouth. “Was that sexist, or you just generally being a dick? I can’t tell.”

“I didn’t mean it like that, I just meant that she’s the adult, so she should be doing adult-things.”

Pepper’s sigh gets caught up in a yawn as she says, “Yes, well, I’ll just get onto those taxes and insurance claims, shall I?”

She reclines further across the couch, having more room for her legs now that Darcy is sitting up. “And I haven’t even hit thirty yet, I’ll have you know. Now fix me my breakfast, irresponsible and reckless teenager who is therefore below me in society.”

“Big words,” Darcy says, scrubbing her eyes with her hand. “Early.”

 “Noon,” Bruce corrects her, and doesn’t protest when she takes his the spoon out of his bowl and scoops up some cereal, sucking the spoon clean before putting it back.

Tony opens his mouth to berate her, but forgets he was even going to when he feels a brush against his shoulder, because when he looks over, Steve still has that small flick of a smile.

“I thought I’d have that hot chocolate after all,” he says, and Tony remembers about that soft smile and that soft mouth forming his name that one time in Bio.

Tony says, “Okay,” and slips even further, barely bothering to even acknowledge it as he does, and doesn’t let himself wonder if Steve is still thinking about what he said back at the coffee shop.

He shells out two mugs: a Spongebob Squarepants themed one for him, one with a logo of a Canadian hotel for Steve.

Steve pours a teaspoon of hot chocolate powder into his, and Tony rips open a packet of instant coffee powder and does the same.

They’re waiting for the water to boil when Clint says, “Tony, panklets, come and get ‘em while they’re awesome,” and Tony doesn’t bother with a fork, he just manhandles them into his mouth.

“Don’t judge me,” he says thickly, chocolate sticking to the roof of his mouth.

“No judgement here,” Steve says. “I’m waiting for mine to melt.”

It’s midday exactly, and Tony has a mouthful of panklets and nowhere he’d rather be.

 

 


	20. Chapter 20

Around four in the afternoon, they run out of food.

Which is apparently one of the worst things to ever happen in the history of humanity, including Hitler and all Nazi-related incidents in between him.

“Well, so-ho- _ree_ I don’t have my kitchen stocked for half a dozen growing adolescents who are all eating like they just smoked a bowl,” Pepper says when Darcy yells from the fridge that there’s no food left.

Darcy sighs, slapping her hands down against her pockets as she comes back into the lounge. “Fine. Can I have money for pizza?”

“What am I, your mother?”

“No,” Darcy says, “but you’re the one who the police are going to glare at when they find the corpses of starving teenagers all reaching helplessly towards the empty cupboard.”

Pepper gives her an all-suffering look and stretches out on the couch, over Tony’s lap. “Ladies and gentlemen, get out your wallets. There’s a pizza shop about a block from here.”

“I know, I used to live around here.” Darcy bends down to get her bag out from under the coffee table, and manages to find her purse without having to tip everything out onto the floor, for once. “Who’s going to get it? They don’t do takeout.”

Clint looks up from where he’s playing a halfhearted game of Uno with Bruce and Steve-it was either that or watch Star Wars, which both Tony and Bruce hate with a passion- and asks, “Couldn’t we order in from one that does?”

Darcy, Tony and Pepper all say, “No,” at the same time, and at the confused looks they get, Tony shakes his head.

“Trust us. You have to try the pizza from this place at least once in your life. It’s like- it’s like the best meal you’ve ever had, magnified by a billion. Plus extra beef. It’s a little slice of heaven, pepperoni and an orgasm all squeezed in between a cheesy crust.”

He’s been making ineffectual hand motions this whole time, trying to convey said pizza and failing miserably, instead making it look like a bad rendition of ‘itsy bitsy spider.’

“Uh,” Bruce says, not looking up from his cards. “Right. Orgasm in a cheesy crust. That probably sounds a lot less appealing than you meant it to.”

Tony opens his mouth, but Pepper cuts him off with: “Everyone give Darcy five bucks, or whatever they’ve got. Steve, go with Darcy and hold her umbrella, or something.”

“I don’t have an umbrella.”

“Why the hell d-” Pepper sits up slightly, her chin bumping against Tony’s knee. “Okay, there’s one by the door. Because I’m an adult, and am therefore responsible. I think ahead.”

“You ran out of food.”

“Again, I apologize for not foreseeing you all showing up and only having leftovers and ramen,” Pepper says, turning over so her hair is splayed out over Tony’s jeans. “Guys, money. Now.”

“Okey-dokey, responsible adult,” Tony says, reaching into his pocket.

She lifts her chin and brings it down hard on his thighs, and he just laughs.

 

Ever since about the end of middle school, Darcy has been waiting for Steve and Tony to have their own individual- fuck, even joined- Big Gay Freakouts and finally get together.

It’s been a while, and it hasn’t turned out that way- Tony had a minor freakout at age 12, but he got over it quickly and proceeded to hoot loudly at a seventeen year old guy while he and Darcy were bouncing on a trampoline. She remembers only being able to see the guy when they jumped high enough to look over the fence, and the both of them yelling and waving and doing what they thought was wolf-whistling, which wound up being whistling with their fingers in their mouths.

Steve- to be honest, she doesn’t really know who or what Steve is into, just that his eyes occasionally linger on her breasts (which, come on, she can’t blame him, if people don’t sometimes stare at her breasts they’re either repulsed by lady parts, blind or a different species), but there’s also been some serious eye-fucking going on with Tony over the years, so.

Well, not eye-fucking, more like longing, horny stares at the back of each other’s heads and then looking away if the other one notices.

And after over five years of this shit, she and many other people are at the point where they’re considering locking them both in a room together until they either fuck it out or talk about things, because it’s getting ridiculous.

At first, though, she had thought it was just mutual infatuation/morbid fascination born from two pretty boys being pretty and throwing said pretty at each other unintentionally. She had been under that impression for a few years, at least, because how else could she explain it? How else could she interpret how they trailed off sometimes, how they knew next to nothing about each other and still got tongue-tied when they looked over and the other one hadn’t turned away fast enough?

And Darcy isn’t exactly an expert at this, but she knows how easy it can be to fall for someone when you barely know them. Fuck, most of the time she’s found it easier to fall for a stranger that she sits next to on a bus than for someone she’s been going out with for a month or so.

So she had chalked Steve and Tony down to not knowing each other well enough or even at all and moved on, minus the eye-rolling whenever Tony started the longing, horny stares during class.

But then, miraculously, they had actually started talking. More than usual, she means- more than the occasional nod or hushed, worried texts about Clint. And even more miraculously, neither of them lost interest after said talks, which is what Darcy would have done.

It’s different than what she thought it would be, than what she thought they would be. When she imagined their relationship- which was in short, bored bursts when she had nothing else to do and Tony was still making googly-eyes at Steve- she imaged it as being one of those passionate flings you see in the movies; the overwhelming, brilliant haze with copious amounts of incredible sex that never happens in real life, vows never to leave each other’s side except for food and water, possible murders, and screamed arguments that all fizzle out after the thrill wears off.

Instead, she gets the two of them nodding at each other and saying, “See you,” when they step over everyone towards the door to go and get pizza, and it’s- nice. They’re all smiling when they leave.

It’s then that Darcy realizes it; quiet and slow, like it was there all along: they don’t complete each other. They complement each other.

 _Then again_ , she thinks as the door closes behind them, _this is make it or break it. They could always go back to not talking after this weekend._

The idea pisses her off more than it should, and she’s not sure why.

 

“Pothole,” Steve says, and shifts the umbrella so Darcy moves with it, out of the way.

She glances up at him, and he’s framed by the fence that she always used to sit on when she was six, just after she had started hanging out with Clint. The fence is long and wooden and bright red, but it’s been burnt slightly and the red had got chipped off at some point. It’s gotten painted over since Darcy left: it’s still red, but the wrong shade of it.

Potholes and paint: two of the things that appear and reappear when she wasn’t around to notice them. It makes Darcy’s throat dry, and for a second she wonders what else has changed while she wasn’t looking.

She’s getting rain up her tights, no matter how she tries to avoid it. She takes what’s almost a leap over the next pothole, because apparently there are a lot of them, and the umbrella that Steve is holding jolts as he tries to cover them both.

It’s her old street but it’s not, and things have changed: the tree that got cut down, the house with all the lights off that used to have children bursting from the seams, the dog that used to sit by the corner shops that’s still there, but it’s lost a leg.

She lists to the side quickly before going into the pizza shop, reaching down to stroke the dog’s flank.

“Hey, girl,” she says quietly, and the dog’s tail thumps just as fast as she remembers.

Steve says, “Uh,” and Darcy bites down on a laugh and says, “Hey, _boy_! Fuck! Okay, never saw _those_. Hey, boy. You been good?”

Her hand drops down to scratch under the dog’s chin, and his mouth flops open, its tongue lolling out the side. His fur has the same rough, carpet-y feel to it, and she remembers being six and burying her face in it, breathing in.

It makes her grin, and Steve says, in a tone that makes it obvious he’s holding back a smile, “Old friend of yours?”

“Sort of,” she answers, and is actually surprised when she notices the lack of his back leg again, so he rocks sideways slightly when his tail wags.

The dog- fuck, she never actually asked the owners of this place what its name was- makes a low whining sound at the back of its throat when Darcy reluctantly drops her hand.

“Fuck,” she says, almost to herself. “You must be a billion years old in dog years.”

Steve follows her in when she pushes the door open, and folds the umbrella up. He props it up against the leg of a chair when he slides in next to Darcy.

“Where did you used to live?”

Darcy looks down from the menu above the counter which had been replaced with a different one, grey writing on a white background instead of red. “What?”

“Where did you used to-”

“Oh, about two blocks away.”

“Good memories?”

Shrug. “I guess.”

She steers the conversation away from it, makes him focus on the hurried list that they had been given, and orders everything herself.

None of them recognize her as she reads from the list, and she can’t figure out if she’s disappointed- she looks different, obviously, and it’s been almost nine years.

The owner’s eyes graze down to her cleavage a few times as she orders, and she remembers how he used to reassure her parents that the dog outside wouldn’t bite her. She smiles and tries to be discreet, turning away to face the ever-constant wallpaper when she pulls the zip of her jacket up to her neck.

The people behind the counter haven’t changed, but all have a little more worry lines, a little more smile lines, and on the table around the back that Darcy can see if she cranes her neck, there’s a kid- five or six, with a bad haircut- doodling on the back of a receipt with a ballpoint pen.

She comes to sit back next to Steve and might lean in a little, because this is somewhere she’s been dozens of times before and things are slipping away differently to how she remembers them.

“So,” Steve says, and it’s quiet, and Darcy wants to tense when she hears it, but she bites the inside of one of her lips.

“Their dad hits them,” Steve says, and his hands are curling, unfurling, over and over in the inner seam of his jacket. “Clint and Bruce. Sometimes.”

It’s a punch from someone who you’ve been bracing yourself against, one where the person has held their fist in front of your face for a long time. You’ve held yourself up, you’ve stood your ground and you know what’s coming, you’ve known it for a long time, but it still hurts like a bitch when those knuckles finally bruise your cheek.

“Yeah,” Darcy says after a long time, after Steve has dropped his gaze. She wets her lips, and bites down hard before letting go. “What do we do?”

“I’ve been trying,” Steve says, and for a second she thinks he’s going to finish that sentence, but his shoulder cave in a bit and he stops. “I’ve been, uh. I’ve been thinking it over.”

Darcy watches the steady movement of a knife slicing herbs, the blade flashing up and down in a smooth rhythm, and thinks of Steve leaving it at, _I’ve been trying_. 

“They could leave. Move out, or whatever.”

“Yeah.” Steve is linking his fingers together, then pulling them apart, running his nails over his palms every time he does. He leaves red, raised marks. “It’s just- they’re treating it like it doesn’t matter. I mean, I get that it doesn’t happen often, and it’s probably just a thing they deal with and then try to put it behind them, but- they’re both acting like it’s not a big deal.”

“Maybe it’s not.”

Steve looks at her again, like he’s chancing it, like he’s dealing with an animal backed into the corner. Actually, he sort of looks like one at the moment.

“Maybe they don’t think it is,” Darcy continues, and refuses to look at him when she’s sitting in a pizza shop that’s blaringly unfamiliar and feels like home at the same time. “It wouldn’t be, y’know? And they just want to forget about it. My mom hit Jane once, and I never really thought about it afterwards.”

Steve isn’t staring, but he’s not looking away, either. His gaze is sort of in-between, and Darcy tries to remember how long it used to take for a pizza to get ready.

It takes her a second to remember that Steve doesn’t actually know her that well, and she doesn’t know him that well, either, and that he probably doesn’t know who Jane is.

“Jane’s my little sister,” she says, and Steve’s weight is at her side- warm, unassuming, but still worrying at his palms with his nails.

“It wasn’t, like, a punch. It was- I don’t know, a shove? But more than that, it-”

She doesn’t try to remember it often, and right now, as she feels it start to drift back, she remembers she had had her first taste of wine that night, and had hated it.

“Jane had just turned five, and she wasn’t going to bed, or cleaning her room, or something. I don’t know. And mum has these- I don’t even know what they call them, I- maniac-depressive fits? I don’t know, she just gets sort of, um. She takes pills for it.”

It’s tar on her tongue- hot and smothering, and she can’t stop now.

“And, um. Anyway, she sort of lost it at Jane, and shoved her. It was a tiny shove, but then she did it again, and sort of caught her across the face when she pulled back. And she kept shoving her, and then Jane was on the ground, and she was crying, and mom was, like, screaming at her, all this shit about how Jane was useless and stupid and how she wished she didn’t have to put up with-”

Less details. Less is more, as they say. Or something.

She’s seen this part before, in movies- this is the part where she’s supposed to break down and wail and somehow look attractive throughout all of it, but honestly, she doesn’t really feel like crying. Mostly, she just feels awkward and stupid and out of place; and her stomach keeps growling.

Out of nowhere, she remembers her mom telling her that it was her stomach eating itself, when they were on a car ride in from Denver and Darcy had spent two hours cooped up with no leg space with her head half out the window.

“Anyway,” she says again, and she can feel her bare heel poking out of her left shoe, pressing into the linoleum. “Mom sort of slapped her a bit. A few times. And shoved her some more, and Jane was, uh. Bleeding, kind of, sort of a nosebleed, and she was crying, and then mom was crying, and then dad pulled her off of her and everyone was crying and they went to the doctors to check Jane and probably to get more pills for mom, and, uh.”

She remembers standing in the doorway and watching. She remembers being uselessly heavy, not being able to _think I should pull her away from Jane_ , because her mom’s arm was arcing out and it was blunt and hard and violent, like a bunched fist, and there hadn’t been any words for how their voices were cracking around the sides, splitting right down the middle.

She clears her throat, and Steve still has that weird, in-between stare where he’s not looking at her but he kind of is.

“It only happened once, and only with Jane, so. And yeah, I’d be fine with forgetting about it, because I don’t think Jane even remembers. She was too young, or she blocked it out, or whatever.”

Steve finally turns his head, so he’s fully looking at her. His eyes are lighter in the rain, she’s noticed.

“Do you think it’s a big deal?”

It takes her a few seconds before she says, “I don’t think it’s a _small_ deal, but I don’t think it’s something to freak out over. I mean- it was just once, and Jane’s fine. So.”

Steve is silent, his nails scraping.

If she listens hard, Darcy can hear the kid in the back ask for something in a different language.

She wets her lips again, and almost tells Steve about the time that her mom brought them all their favourite ice creams home as a surprise, and they didn’t even have to tell her what they were. That her mom does the washing almost every week, and Darcy always comes home on a Saturday night and makes her bed, curling up in the lemon-scented sheets.

That once, her mom spent a whole night sewing a costume for Darcy’s musical debut, even though she had work the next day and Darcy had ended up being crap anyway.

That her mom has days where she screams and throws plates at the walls and refuses to eat anything, and, as her dad says, is the dictionary-definition of ‘intolerable.’ That she has days where she has bags under her eyes and she smells like vomit, and she still gets up to kiss her kids and tells them she loves them before they leave for school.

That she’s sure that Clint and Bruce’s dad isn’t a bad guy, or maybe he is. She’s sure that their dad is the one who taught Clint how to make panklets without burning them, or taught Bruce how to read, or gave them both swimming lessons, or maybe he gave up on them long before that and they’ve all only started noticing the bruises now.

 _Nothing is black and white_ , Darcy’s mom told her once.

Darcy had frowned with all the stubbornness that a six year old could muster and said, _newspapers. And penguins! And-_

Both her parents had laughed for a solid ten minutes at that, and it makes Darcy’s lips twitch to think about it.

“You think it’s a big deal,” she says, and doesn’t realize she’s saying it until she’s halfway through.

She watches Steve’s shoulders lift, and then drop.

“I don’t think it’s a small deal, either,” he says. “But I’m not going to call you out on anything. And I get it, sort of.”

“Sort of?”

He shrugs again, and Darcy thinks of stories and how many there are in tiny movements that everyone’s repeated thousands of times- a shrug, a kick, a lean sideways, a press of lips. That at some point, there is always going to be a movement where it all started from- a smile has always started with a twitch.

“Sort of,” he says, and he pushes his hair out of his face- it’s dusted with rain. “I can’t speak from experience, but I can sort of see it how you see it.”

Darcy wants to tell him that she’d like him to tell her how she sees it, because half the time she has no fucking idea.

When she looks over at him, Steve meets her gaze. For a second, she thinks he’s going to keep dragging this out, his mouth open on the verge of saying something, but when he finally speaks it’s to ask when the pizza will be ready.

“No idea. It’ll be worth it, though. These guys have the best pizza in the state. Not officially, but you can tell.”

“I’ll take your word for it,” Steve says, and water tracks down from his hair.

Darcy feels a flood of- something, and it pulses through her once and it’s gone before she can blink.

“I can see why Tony likes you,” she says, and Steve’s gaze skates downwards before going back to her.

“Uh,” he says, and he’s smiling. There’s colour high in his cheeks, swelling red under the skin. “Thanks.”

Darcy keeps her eyes on the menu board up above both of their heads. “Definitely not a compliment.”

That surprises a laugh out of him, short and breezy.

He says, “I can see why he likes you, too.”

 

 


	21. Chapter 21

They manage to get through two and a half pizzas before they call it quits and put the rest of it in the fridge, despite Tony’s protests that he can get through the rest of it.

“If you get through the rest of it, your stomach will burst and you’ll haemorrhage and die,” Bruce says through a mouthful of cheese, and swallows. “Skating over the fact that I know nothing about the human body or how it works, so you might just throw up instead of haemorrhaging and dying.”

Tony shoves Bruce’s feet off the coffee table. “Either way, I’m eating the rest of it later.”

Steve watches Bruce shove Tony in the shoulder and hides a smile with his hand- Bruce’s never been that comfortable around people he doesn’t know that well, but here he is, talking and bitching and shoving Tony like he’s known him for years.

Which, okay, he has. But he doesn’t _know_ him, know him.

And now Steve has a sudden, increasingly burning urge to quote Harry Potter, because there are some things you can't share without ending up liking each other, and knocking out a twelve-foot mountain troll is one of them.

Except instead of knocking out a twelve-foot mountain troll, they sat in a hospital waiting room and argued over who got to drive and ate pizza and woke Clint up every twenty minutes to make sure he hadn’t gone into a coma.

That, and they already liked each other, he’s pretty sure. Or they didn’t hate each other, at least- it was Clint, Darcy and Tony clumped together, and then Steve and Bruce, and then Pepper and Tony, and then Clint and Bruce, obviously, because they’re twins and it’s inevitable. They were all kind of scattered around beside each other, slotted in the middle of each other’s groups and in between each other’s lives.

And there are others, of course- Clint and the Meats, because there are at least three of them that he’s genuinely friends with, that got caught up in the same thing he did. Then there’s Natasha, who is Clint’s Underlined-Something, and the many and varied people that Tony occasionally hooks up with.

Then Reenie from Biology class that has had a crush on Darcy for three years; and Christine, and Skeet. Bucky, who was Steve’s best friend in second grade next to Bruce, and Steve still hangs out with her sometimes, for old time’s sake.

Tony yawns, even though it’s not barely six o’clock, and leans over to tap Pepper’s knee. “The ‘no smoking inside’ rule is still applicable, correct?”

“You light up in here and you’ll find yourself tackled through the window before you can say ‘smoking kills and makes your breath smell like crap,’” Pepper answers, not looking up from where she’s scouring the TV guide.

“Fair enough.” Tony pushes himself up from where he’s been sitting pulled up to the coffee table, for easier access to pizza. He looks around the room and says, “All you non-smokers, stay in here and breathe in your putrid fresh air. Smokers, come with me.”

“You’re all idiots who are going to die choking on your own bile,” Bruce says as Darcy and Clint get up.

Darcy flicks him the finger, but bumps her hand against his shoulder as he passes. “At least we’ll look cool while doing said choking.”

“Smoking doesn’t-”

“It makes you look cool and you know it,” Clint cuts him off. “Shut up, little brother.”

“I’m _older_ than you.”

“Three minutes doesn’t count,” Clint says, and grins, shark-like.

Bruce has the expression that Steve likes to dub as ‘the pissed off sibling’ look, which he’s really every only seen from the twins.

“It does, t- wait, are people who just had a concussion supposed to smoke?”

Everyone looks from Bruce to Clint, who frowns.

“Probably? How the fuck am I supposed to know?”

“You could haemorrhage and die,” Bruce says.

“ _I’m not going to haemorrhage and die_ , fucking hell, stop saying that. What is with you and making everyone haemorrhage and die?” Clint teeters between sitting back down and moving for the door, his face twisting. “Pepper, what do you think?”

“How the hell am I supposed to know?”

“You graduated college!”

“And that makes me a doctor?” Pepper has her hands spread, almost hitting Darcy in the face with them. “Someone Google it.”

Steve presses his lips together, hard, to stop a laugh from escaping. “Don’t you think it’d be a better idea to ring someone who’s actually qualified for this?”

Pepper stabs a carrot stick at him- one of the only things they had except for dry ingredients after the food ‘ran out.’ “Wikipedia wouldn’t lie to us, okay? And there’s some serious scientific shit on some of those websites. Go get my laptop.”

“Go get your own laptop.”

“It’s in my room, I’m not walking th- don’t any of you have internet on your phones?”

Tony is at the door, half-pulling it open, and leans back. “Guys, can you think of any reason why smoking would screw with his concussion? Which he got, like, almost two days ago, by the way.”

“Haemorrhage and die,” Bruce says helpfully, and Clint swats at him.

Darcy leans sideways against the wall, her legs crossing. “I say we stay inside and drink. It’s fucking freezing outside, and your porch sucks at keeping the rain off.”

“For the third hundred time,” Pepper says through gritted teeth, “I flat-out refuse to get you guys drunk. Big no-no. One of you shows up drunk here, fine. But do the drinking someplace that isn’t under my roof.”

Darcy says, “Like the porch?”

Pepper turns around on the couch to face her. “If any of you get drunk within a twenty-meter radius of my house, I will pistol-whip you.”

“THERE IS NO REASON FOR SMOKING A CIGARETTE TO BE DANGEROUS TO SOMEONE WHO GOT CONCUSSED A FEW DAYS AGO, OR PROBABLY EVEN A FEW MINUTES AGO,” Clint says, announcing it to the ceiling.

“HAEMORRAGE AND DIE,” Bruce replies, straight-faced, and Clint throws up his hands, biting out a swear.

Tony asks the room, “Hey, is a concussed person allowed to drink?”

And then, at the face that Pepper gives him: “Or not, jeez. I meant in general.”

“I AM NOT CONCUSSED,” Clint says, like a foghorn. “I WAS CONCUSSED AND NOW AM NOT. HENCE, I AM NO LONGER CONCUSSED.”

Tony blinks at him for a long second, and a smile breaks out across his face. “You said ‘hence.’ Oh, my god. I’m so proud.”

Steve is now biting the inside of his cheek to stop himself from laughing, because Clint is getting increasingly more frustrated and Bruce keeps saying things in that same tone and Tony keeps trying to wedge big words into the conversation and Darcy is leaning, unbothered, against the wall, and Steve is enjoying this so much more than he should.

Clint says, “WHAT EVEN IS HAEMORRAGING,” and Bruce hesitates before saying, “SOMETHING BAD THAT USUALLY RESUSLTS IN DEATH?”

Clint’s jaw works, teeth grinding.

“You _people_ ,” he huffs, and Steve wants to tell him, _I know. Isn’t it great?_

 

It’s the best weekend Steve has had in a long time, and they barely even do anything.

Tony, Darcy and Clint go outside for a smoke, and when they come back in they’re all drizzled with rain because the wind blew it under the porch.

Darcy says, “Shut the fuck up,” when Bruce starts to laugh, before sitting down next to him and stealing the remote.

Clint sits down next to her, and Tony ducks into the bathroom. He comes out thirty seconds later, and Steve doesn’t even try not to watch him as Tony’s tongue scrapes over his teeth.

Steve catches his eye as he slides down to sit on the floor, leaning against the coffee table. He raises his eyebrows towards the bathroom, and Tony shrugs.

He mimes putting a cigarette to his lips and then mouths, _I hate the taste._

Steve nods, and finds himself thinking he’d still kiss him if he tasted like smoke, if he tasted like coffee. He’d still kiss him if he tasted like the end of a joint and the hot slide of alcohol like last time, and he’d kiss him now, when Tony is tasting like whatever Pepper’s toothpaste tastes like.

Someday, he wants to find out what Tony’s mouth tastes like without them; what it’s like to lick past his lips and just taste him by himself.

Not that people really taste like much, anyway- it’s always macaroni or mouthwash or mothballs, but in his experience, most of the people he’s kissed have tasted like something burning, including Tony.

And he remembers the coffee shop: how Tony had flinched at the sun, how he had stumbled over words but had kept going like he was running a damn marathon. How he had asked, _why don’t you think I like you like that_ , and Steve’s face had flickered, because- because-

It sounds stupid even in his head, but at the time he had thought- kind of still does think- that Tony had meant ‘like that’ as in a physical attraction, like Steve was a warm body within arm’s reach and therefore will have to suffice, as opposed to whatever Steve has been aiming towards.

So yes, he had faltered and his expression had flickered slightly, and he still doesn’t know what he had let slip though.

But then Tony had started saying things, things sort of adjacent to what Steve was thinking, and it was messy and Steve honestly doesn’t remember half of it. And when Tony had stepped over his own words, when he was almost skidding in them, getting tangled and grabbing things to stop himself from falling over, he had white-knuckled the coffee cup and said, _I like you, I like how you are,_ and Steve had thought that over to the point where he was almost 100%, die-hard, stake-his-non-existent-heritance-on-it certain that Tony meant it like Steve did.

But there’s always the chance that he didn’t, and that if Steve were to say anything, all he would get is a puzzled look and a polite shut-down, and maybe not even that.

And they’re toeing the line to something, they have been for a while, but Steve still doesn’t know what that ‘something’ is and he’s not sure Tony does, either. He’s gotten used to this, to fumbling around blind with his hands out, feeling his way around the walls and the floors until he finally hits something, but for once he’d like to have something sorted out, Tony-wise. He wants a semi-clear definition, a _yes, we’re friends_ or _yes, we’re going to try being more than whatever we’ve been up until this point_ , or even _I hate you, never befoul my presence again with your stupid clothes and your boring face_ , as long as he has something to work around.

Because right now nobody knows where they stand, and Steve, for one, is tired of stepping carefully.

 

It’s eight-ish, and they’ve all texted their parents to tell them they’re staying over at a friend’s place. Steve says he’s at Bruce’s, Bruce says he’s at Steve’s, and Darcy and Clint both say they’re at Tony’s.

Tony doesn’t open his phone, and when Steve asks about it- and he makes sure to make it casual, a throwaway statement that he can easily gloss over- Tony just shrugs again and says his parents aren’t going to worry.

Pepper has stated repeatedly that they’re going to bed at a sane hour of night, and Tony nudges her and says, “Sure, _mom_ ,” and she holds a cushion over his face until he apologizes.

Then Darcy gets it into her head that baking a cake would be a good idea, because while they’re out of food, they still have enough ingredients to make a (shamefully tiny) lemon cake, because lemons are the only thing left in the fruit bowl and obviously eight o’clock is the prime time for baking.

She drags Clint and Pepper into the kitchen- Clint because he can actually cook, Pepper because she’s been dubbed as the responsible one who will know what to do if they accidentally burn the house down- and leaves Bruce, Steve and Tony in the lounge watching reruns of some old show that Steve can quote the lines along to.

When the yelling in the kitchen has mostly died down, Bruce makes an offhand comment about the main actor’s hair, which Tony takes a personal offence to. This leads to a heated argument over the normal styles of actor’s hair in the 90s and whether or not it’s still deemed attractive, and finally Steve cuts in and says, “I think it looks like he has a greased otter on his head.”

Tony turns to him, his eyes bright. “ _Thank_ you. Lovely imagery, by the way.”

Then he’s holding his hand out, his fingers curled in all except for his pinkie, and Steve stares at it for a second, which is about the same time it clicks for Tony and he blinks down at his own hand like he didn’t notice he was doing it.

“Ah,” he says, and starts to drop it, before Steve’s hand bolts out and he wraps his pinkie around Tony’s. He tries to mimic what Clint did; squeezing quickly before letting go.

Tony is still staring at his hand, his eyes sort of wide, and Bruce mouths something at Steve that he doesn’t catch.

“Right,” Steve says, mostly to get his thoughts sorted. “So the pinkie thing is a, uh, congratulations?”

It takes another few seconds for Tony to snap out of his hand-induced daze and say, “What?”

“The pinkie thing. Is it-”

“Oh,” Tony says. And then, “Oh! That’s, that’s.”

His hand comes up to rub behind his head, one side of his mouth scrunching. “I don’t know, to be honest. I started doing it and now I can’t seem to stop. It’s a thing that my people do.”

“Your people?”

“Yeah.”

Steve feels the words up his throat before he says them, and for some reason it tastes like hot chocolate. “I’m your people?”

Tony says, “You’re my person,” and then blanches slightly, like he didn’t mean to say that.

At this point, Bruce is looking stuck between confused and amused, and bunches his knee up to his chest, holding onto it with both hands.

“I,” Tony says, and he looks like one of those fish that Steve used to see in the pet store: his mouth flashing open, shut, open, shut. “I, uh.”

Then he twists around, towards the kitchen door. “Guys! Front and centre! And wash your hands!”

There’s a sound like something clattering into the sink, and Darcy yells, “WHAT THE FUCK, WE’RE BUSY.”

“GET IN HERE,” Tony yells back.

“WHY.”

“BECAUSE. I’M TEACHING STEVE IMPORTANT THINGS.”

“I don’t want to know about your sex life,” Clint says, and Tony yells, “GET THE FUCK IN HERE, NOW,” and then Pepper is in the doorway, dragging Clint by the arm.

Darcy comes through a second later, pissed off and drying her hands on her skirt.

She puts a hand on her hip, pushing it out in a way that Steve has only seen her do when she’s angry. “What?”

Tony is moving, shifting onto the couch next to Steve and slotting their pinkies together, and then Bruce on the other side. “Everyone link pinkies, now.”

Darcy fixes him with a tired glare that could probably kill small children and old people. “Are you fucking kidding me?”

“Link pinkies,” Tony says, dead serious and searing hot through Steve’s fingers.

“What the fuck are you-”

“We’re bonding,” Tony says, straight-faced. He holds up both his hands, dragging Steve and Bruce’s hands up with him. “Bond with us.”

Pepper has both her lips pressed tight together, like she’s trying her very best not to burst out laughing, and Clint just looks confused.

From beside the both of them, Bruce sighs loudly. “It’s a thing. Go with it.”

“I know it’s a thing,” Darcy says snippily, and her hands flex.

In the end, it’s Pepper next to Clint, next to Darcy, next to Steve, next to Tony, next to Bruce, and it lasts a good six seconds before Clint says flatly, “My nose itches.”

Tony turns his laugh into a cough halfway through, and Steve can feel it shaking through their hands.

“Yeah, fuck this,” Darcy says. “I’m thirsty.”

“I have a free hand,” Pepper offers, sticking said hand up straight in the air.

Darcy snorts. “What are you going to do, put it up to my mouth and pour? Every single person that’s ever done that to me spilled it all over my fucking clothes. It’s the reason people have trust issues, I swear to god.”

Both of Steve’s hands are being warmed by the body heat of other people, even if it’s just through their pinkies, and it’s uncomfortable- they’re all packed tightly into the couch, and Clint and Darcy are standing off to the side, arms angled out sort of awkwardly- but Steve is still fighting a smile.

“Just a while longer,” Tony says, his head tipped back against the couch, and Steve can see the long flow of his throat over his collarbones. “Then we can all let go and you can go burn that cake.”

Darcy tries to kick him, but ends up grazing her foot across his calf. “I take offense to that.”

There’s a small silence- a thimbleful of it, as Steve’s mom would say- and it’s a few seconds before, on the other side of Tony, Bruce says, “I think I know the name of the Pack.”

Tony eases open one eye and turns slightly. “What Pack?”

“This Pack,” Bruce says, and Tony’s other eye opens, both focused on him.

“Yeah?”

Bruce isn’t looking at any of them- instead, he’s looking at the TV screen, where the volume is turned right down and they haven’t been able to get the Swedish subtitles off for the whole two days.

Bruce says, “The strays,” and it falls onto all of them, through their hands and under their skin, and Steve opens his mouth to say _, that’s actually really appropriate_ , but he can’t seem to get it out.

He glances up, and no-one’s looking at each other. They’re still joined by their pinkies, warm hands against warm hands, and he can feel Darcy and Tony both pressing up against his sides.

For a split second, Steve thinks of that old rule that his middle school teacher used to tell him: if you come up close to someone else’s heart, after a while both your and their heartbeats will slow or quicken to the same pace. He wonders if this counts or not- little fingers all linked in a row full of separate, lonely people who miss their footing and fumble at things and are generally pinpointed messes at the best of times.

It lasts for a minute, at least, where none of them meet each other’s gaze and everything is weird and tense and kind of fragile, like someone speaking is going to shatter whatever it is that’s happening.

Finally, Clint says, “Woof, woof,” under his breath, and Bruce heaves out a breath like he’s been tucking it away since people stopped talking.

Darcy starts giggling nervously, and says, “Arf, arf,” and Clint butts her with his shoulder, and she pushes him back.

Then a smattering of laughter breaks out, soft at first and then gaining speed, until most of them have let go of each other’s pinkies and they’re bent over the couch or their own knees and choking on their own laughter until it aches, long and deep in their bellies, but in the best way.

“What the _fuck_ ,” Darcy manages, hacking it out, her hand loose over her mouth.

“I don’t know, I thought it fit,” Bruce says, and his grin is stretching further than Steve has ever seen it.

 

Pepper pulls out the plug to the TV and makes everyone go to bed at nine, after Darcy has spent ten minutes crooning over her slightly deflated lemon cake, which is cooling on the counter.

Steve spends a few minutes trying to edge away from Bruce’s freezing feet and hyping himself up to pull off the half-baked plan he has in his head. When he gets up they all look up at him, but Bruce is the only one who looks interested.

“Bathroom,” Steve says quietly, and Bruce shifts his legs out of the way so he can get past.

The walk down the hall to the spare room feels like one of those long, winding journeys that people go through in stories- crossing deserts, oceans, continents, when really it’s Steve’s bare feet on the carpet and it takes him less than thirty seconds to find which room it is.

He doesn’t let his hand rest on the doorknob, he just twists it and pushes the door open before he can talk himself out of it.

Tony blinks at him, sitting up in his bed, and his mouth is open slightly; his eyes are wide in the lack of light.

It’s one of the things Steve has never been able to stop staring at: if he’s not struggling to keep it down, Tony’s emotions are all over the place, scrawled and sprawled and loose.

“Um,” Tony says. “The bathroom’s to the right, if you were-”

“I like how you are, too.”

Tony falters, staring, before his eyes start to track as Steve keeps walking closer.

When Steve is close enough that he could reach out and touch Tony if he wanted to, Tony stammers into speech again.

“I. What?”

Steve wonders briefly how hard it would be to hit Tony on the head, sprint back to the lounge and try to convince him it was all a dream tomorrow, because Tony _doesn’t fucking remember_ and Steve has never wanted to spontaneously combust as much as he does right now, and that includes the time he accidentally got both his pants and his boxers pulled down in front of everyone at his family reunion when he was twelve.

“I like how you are, too?” Steve isn’t moving closer anymore, and his hands are both fisted in the pockets of his pants. “At the coffeeshop, you said, um.”

“I know what I said,” Tony says, and it’s half a relief and half still makes Steve want to knock him over the head with the bedside lamp and make for the door.

Then it’s quiet, and Steve digs his nails into his palms, and thinks of the movies they’ve watched this weekend- the clear-cut endings, the carefully thought out scenes, the romantic interludes where nothing is awkward and everything falls into place- and realizes that this is nothing like that, not even close.

That a lot of things that sound good in a movie sound stupid if you say them out loud, and that most of the time, things aren’t the grand, swooping scenes of a movie. They’re long and boring and you don’t get to fast forward anything, and people actually eat and go to the toilet and pick nose hairs out with their fingernails and stroke their own face for no reason, because people do things that don’t happen in movies.

And the things that do happen in movies- the dramatic love confessions in perfect lighting even though the lamp is off, the hospital scenes where the person wakes up in full makeup even though they’ve been in a coma for the last year, the improvised speech out of nowhere which brings everyone to tears- they don’t happen, 99% of the time, and Steve thinks it’s just as well, because he’s fresh out of improvised speeches.

 Tony clears his throat, and Steve jolts- they can’t see each other well; only shadows and the sharp line of Tony’s jaw, which is cutting out the moonlight streaming in from the window.

“Why did you come in here?”

Steve decides- rather wisely, he thinks- that he shouldn’t say, _well, I thought I’d come in here, say what I just said and then wing it._

Then the full impact of that sentence hits him- coming into his room and closing the door when it’s late at night and then coming to stand by his bed, and Tony is looking kind of twitchy and all parts nervous.

Steve blurts, “Not _that_ , I just- I don’t want us to go back to not talking when we go back to school.”

“Sure,” Tony says, relief flushing his voice. “No problem-o.  Long chats ahoy. Or something.”

“Also I, um.” Steve wishes he had brushed his teeth better, because he can still taste a few flecks of pizza, and he’s getting hot flushes under his collar, and he’s so, so bad at this that his hand actually twitches towards the lamp before stops himself, like _, oh my god, do not hit him in the head and run, it only works in soap operas, you do not need to see two concussed people in the span of a weekend._

He swallows; tries again. “So, you don’t remember me kissing you?”

“Not even a weensy bit,” Tony says, his voice less steady than usual. A side of his mouth pulls up, then it snaps back, and then up again. “You planning on rectifying that, or?”

Steve blinks. “How could I make you remember me kissing y-”

“No, no, I mean-” Tony’s hand comes up to scratch his head, then he drops it halfway, then raises it again and rubs at his neck.

“Oh,” Steve says. “I- sure.”

“Don’t do me any favours,” Tony says, half-laughing, but it’s anxious and his smile keeps flickering and his eyes won’t stay anywhere.

“’M not doing you any favours,” Steve mumbles, and bends down.

It’s his second time kissing Tony and Tony’s first time kissing him, and Tony meets his mouth halfway, tipping his face upwards instead of the other way around like they would be doing if they were standing.

It’s still awkward, but neither of them are drunk and/or high and there’s no access spit, so all in all it’s a lot better than last time.

Because last time, the kiss had been pretty one-sided- Steve had been the one doing the kissing and Tony had just sort of stood there and let himself be kissed, but now there’s the sure, soft press of lips against his and Steve is most definitely being kissed, holy wow.

Then Tony’s tongue is sliding gently across the seam of Steve’s lips and he opens his mouth, stupidly cautious and still at a complete loss about what he’s doing.

Steve isn’t sure what he tastes like- probably pizza and toothpaste, which isn’t a good combination on any day, but Tony mostly tastes like mouthwash and something else underneath it that doesn’t seem to be alcohol or weed, so Steve doesn’t really care.

His fingertips skim Tony’s cheeks, thumbs slotting under the slope just under his ears and over his jaw, and Tony’s inhale comes shakily when they part for air.

“I,” Tony says, and his smile is starting to gain altitude, stopping and starting and twisting. “I, uh, won’t be forgetting that. Definitely not. Very memorable. Tip-top shape. Ten out of ten.”

Steve laughs quietly, and he can still feel the full shape of Tony’s lips on his. “Are you even paying attention to what you say anymore?”

“No,” Tony says, almost numbly, shaking his head. Steve’s hands move with it, still cupping his face.

Tony doesn’t move out of Steve’s hands, so Steve doesn’t drop them.

“So, you want to be…” Tony waves a hand, moves to scratch his face before remembering that Steve’s fingers are covering the place he was aiming to scratch. “Whatever?”

Steve huffs, and it lands on Tony’s mouth. “Love to.”

“Okay,” Tony says. “Good. That’s good. Brilliant. I like being your whatever.”

Steve’s lips curl upwards, amused, and Tony makes a strangled noise and says, “Or whatever _s_! Like, a unit of two whatevers. Whatever ‘whatevers’ are, which-”

Steve snorts, horse-like, and then starts to laugh, muffling it by biting his lower lip so it doesn’t get too out of hand and wake anyone up.

“We can come up with a definition for ‘whatever’ later, Aristotle,” he tells him, and his thumbs graze upwards, pressing softly into the stubble.

Tony nods and Steve’s hands move with it, shifting so they fit, and for a second it looks like Tony is going to say something.

Then he says, rushed, like he’s been holding onto it for a minute or so, “Are you going back into the lounge, or?”

Steve opens his mouth, but Tony is bolting past him. “Because this bed can totally fit two people. Not, like- I won’t try anything, I just, uh.”

Tony looks away from him, shrugging. “Hey, I just realized never actually shared a bed with someone. Who knew?”

“Me neither,” Steve says, because he doesn’t think his parents’ bed counts. “And yeah, sure.”

He finds himself thinking, while Tony pulls the covers back and he slides one leg in after the other, that maybe the rain strips it away until all that’s left is therapists hoarding strays and fathers hitting their kids and lemon cake on the bench in the kitchen.

It’s a stupid thought, but he’s punch-drunk on Tony and how the rain is hitting the window- he glances towards it, and there are bottomed-out lines of light filtering through and tracking down the pillowcase, hitting their hair and spilling down, pooling into the hollow of their collarbones.

He shifts closer, too aware of his limbs, until they’re pressing down all the way down their bodies, arm to arm, hip to hip, legs angled over each other.

“By the way,” Tony says, and it’s swallowed by the masses of empty spaces they aren’t filling in the room. “Never, ever quote me. I sounded like a moron when I said it to you, and you sounded- less moronic, granted, but moronic all the same.”

Steve laughs again, and it’s caught by the same empty spaces. “I thought it fit.”

“Don’t quote Bruce, either,” Tony says, and even though Steve can only see his outline through the dark, he knows he’s smiling.

 

 


	22. Chapter 22

At first, Clint thinks it’s the radio- it’s been on every morning since they’ve been here, and it takes a few seconds for him to muddle himself out of sleep and figure out that it’s actually his phone, ringing less than an inch away from his left ear. It’s one of the less than pleasant ways he’s woken up, but by no means the worst.

The ringing phone registers at about the same time he realizes he’s hungry enough to eat a damn horse- a decent-sized horse, at that. A horse who spends his days eating shitloads of grass and never going for gallops down the field until he has more in common with a pony than his fellow horses.

He reaches down to grab for his phone, thinking, _fuck, I sound like Tony_ , before he flips the phone open.

When he speaks it comes out muzzy, like he’s been gargling vinegar.

“’ullo?”

She starts before it’s even out of his mouth: “Where the _hell_ are you?”

It’s one part anger and two parts worry, and it hits behind one of his ribs- the bruised ones that only show it if he looks too close, if he leans on them too hard or presses down- and sits there.

He sits up, swallowing a wince as he does- there’s a welt on his hip that he’s been trying to avoid sitting on, but he just twisted so it dragged on the couch cover- and stands.

“Give me a second,” he says, and Darcy and Bruce are both squinting up at him as he makes his way over to the hall.

“Clint,” his mother says into the phone, and it’s half a sigh and half a yanking strain on her voice.

He closes the door behind him and ducks into the bathroom, doing the same to that door, and clicking the lock.

On instinct, he glances up in the mirror over the sink, before catching his reflection and dropping his gaze, lightning-quick.

“Hey, mom.” He digs his toes into the bathmat, worrying it with his heels. “I texted you. I’m at a friend’s house.”

“Which friend?”

“Aaron’s. Small guy, wears that blue hoodie all the ti-”

“I know who Aaron is, Clint.”

There’s a beat of silence, and he can hear someone saying, _Dr. Anderson to ER,_ twice, over the PA. He imagines his mom’s distracted stare, her trademark fingers looping around her hair, constantly torn between fight and flight in those crappy hospital scrubs.

He thinks of her circulation- fingers, mostly- slowly getting cut off by thick ropes of her fringe as she says, “Are you okay?”

“Yeah, I’m good,” he replies, trying to pick apart the tone of her voice, if she sounds worried enough to have found out, what words she pushed. She obviously hasn’t gone home, because he’s pretty sure Darcy and Bruce hadn’t cleaned anything up when they left.

Hell, if dad hasn’t been home, either- and there’s a good chance he hasn’t this time- it’s probably all still there. The desk that dad knocked over, the bloodied shards of glass from the ornaments on the lounge bookshelf- and he’s known for years that someone would end up picking pieces of them out of their skin, he just hadn’t known what or who.

The hand at his side curls as he thinks back to the broken bits that are strung out all along the hallway, the breaking point that Clint had charged the both of them into and then kept going, the broken leg of the desk chair, the break in his father’s voice.

He avoids his reflection again, reminding him of another broken thing, and clears his throat. “How are you?”

“I’m good,” she says, and there’s a soft scrape, like she’s pulling her fingers through her hair and some of it is breaking off. Whenever Clint thinks of her, she always has at least one hand in contact with her hair.

“I mean, it’s clinic, so. You know how it is.”

Clint digs his feet further into the bathmat- he’s barefoot and the bathroom is the coldest room in the house, as compared to the lounge, which is packed to the roof with shared body heat.

“Yeah,” he says, even though he only has snippets of it- the smudges under her eyes, bags upon bags upon bags, how everything she wears reeks of coffee after a while, how sometimes, if she’s stressed enough, she picks up a pack of cigarettes on the way home.

Again, he glances up at the mirror, before reality slaps him in the face again- which would hurt even more than usual, due to the bruising, etc- and he stares down at his cold feet, instead. “Uh, we were about to get ready for school.”

Another beat of silence, longer than the last one, and he knows the gist of what she’s going to say before she says it:

“Clint, a friend at the hospital told me you’d gotten admitted for a concussion and multiple stitches.”

He opens his mouth to say something, and nothing happens. He stands there with cold feet and bruises and his stomach turning into a rolling growl, and his toes curl into the bathmat and he doesn’t say anything.

And his mother, who is tired enough without him adding his own bullshit to it, makes a sound that’s too close to a sigh and too close to a sob. Then a second later she’s collecting herself again, pulling her shoulders up, because that’s what she does.

He imagines her fingers raking her hair into place, and the practiced shift of her shoulders filling out her sleeves, where he had learned it from the first place, and about the lack of jacket he has on right now.

His mom never cries; has never cried in front of him once in his life. Since he could remember, she’s been the one to lean on and suck in a breath until they’re treading water again, until they can get their heads up and heave in enough breaths to keep walking. She’s been the one who yells at her husband, at teachers, at the parents of patients, at whoever the fuck she wants- people compare her to the mother tigers or lions they see on Animal Planet, and Clint’s never really seen a difference: roaring and swiping, taking whatever comes at her until she can’t anymore.

Then again, she’s only around to do the roaring and swiping one night out of seven, and the rest of it she spends taking twenty-minute naps when she can, under fluorescent lights and the PA that she’s learned to drown out decades ago.

She takes a deep breath, like she’s seconds away from submerging herself in a pool. “Clint, what happened?”

 _Guess_ , he wants to say. Instead, he pushes one of his legs against the lip of the tub, just under the welt. “Mom-”

“Am I going to find the house busted up if I-”

“ _Mom_ -”

Her breath drags in like something ripping down the middle. “Shit. _Shit_ , I _knew_ I should’ve gone home, I-”

“I crashed the car,” Clint blurts. “I mean, I- one of my friends did, and I drove it home, and dad was- yeah,” he says, and it comes out slow and stupid and he’s never been good at this, not through essays or speeches or anything to do with wording, but he keeps going anyway.

“And I- and he was pissed off, and he had quit his job again. And he saw the car, and I just- he didn’t-”

He swallows and stops, and he’s starting to get goosebumps on his uncovered arms.

When he looks up, he notices what he didn’t last night when he had a shower (mindful of the stitches and bruising, but mostly the stitches): there’s a window cracked open, only slightly, but it’s leaking cold air.

He walks over, a shock running up the balls of his feet when the bathmat ends and the tiles start, and pushes against the wooden frame. The joints are stiff- either someone painted over them, or it hasn’t been closed in a long time- and he has to put his whole weight against it for it to finally slap closed, the paint cracking as it does.

His mom hasn’t said a word throughout the entire thirty seconds of this, and he thinks she’s just been listening, knotting her hair with her fingers.

“Are you okay,” she says suddenly, just like she had said it at the start of this, but with more weight pulling on it.

He thinks of her hair, and her hands, and the both of them tangling together, and how Bruce has both the hair and the hands and Clint has neither.

 _He never looks at me_ , he wants to tell her, but he can’t seem to get it out, like his throat is bruised, too. _He never looks at me unless he’s hitting me, and sometimes I try to make him start, because it’s better than the alternative where he won’t look at me even if I’m screaming at him._

“I’m fine,” he says, and his knuckles hover over the prickle of the stitches under his ear, pressing quickly and feeling the dull throb before dropping his hand. “I’m just-”

He keeps his eyes on his feet, and stubbornly doesn’t look up. “-beaten up a bit,” he says lamely. “It’s not that bad. Really.”

“She also emailed me a picture,” his mom says, and it’s as firm as the window was, but flimsier, like he wouldn’t have to lean on it fully for it to give way. “If you don’t want to go to school today, I’m perfectly fine with-”

“No,” Clint stops her, and has to pause.

No school is as appealing as it’s always been, and he’s ditched so often lately he’s been expecting them to call his parents for months now, but now-

But now, what the hell is he going to do otherwise? Sit around Pepper’s apartment and wrestle her for the vodka?

 _She’d win_ , he thinks to himself, remembering her tussle with Tony and how she had thrown handfuls of salt at him, getting it in his eyes. Tony had spent almost half an hour tilting his head under the sink, trying to get the angle right for the salt to wash out, and Bruce had laughed his way through the whole thing until he was red in the face.

He has to bite his lip to smother a smile, which is the last thing he should be doing right now.

“I’m fine with going to school,” he says. “I’ve got people.”

“Good,” she says, but there’s no heart in it- she’s already made it clear she doesn’t like who he hangs out with, and it doesn’t matter that she’s never around to meet them.

These people, though- the ones in the lounge, strewn about on the couch and the floor- she’d like them, he thinks.

He says, “Yeah,” and angles his hip so it doesn’t press on a bruise as he leans against the wall.

More hair scraping, being pulled back into a ponytail and then dropped so it falls out over her shoulders. She’s been doing it more often lately, and she’s had less hair every time she does it.

“He’s never going to lay a hand on you again,” she says, and Clint should probably be surprised by how much reaction he doesn’t have to that. “He’s leaving. And if he doesn’t want to, then I’ll make him.”

There’s been too many times where he’s been like this, so this, right now, is just a notch in the wall.

Too many times like this, where Clint- and Bruce, he’s sure, even though it’s Clint who takes the hits most of the time- wants, so badly, to see dad as the bad guy.

For it to be like it is in cartoons: the child-beating dads beat their children on a regular basis, have no likeable qualities, and have big, black, oily moustaches that they twist around their fingers on occasion.

Because in cartoons, those fathers have their children in the default setting of always, always hating them, and Clint can’t. He’s tried: he’s punched mirrors when he’s seen similarities and focused on it and tried so, so hard to hate his father, and sometimes-many times- he’s succeeded, but it never sticks.

And it’s cut and clear for everyone else, because they just know him as the guy who leaves bruises in the shape of fingers around their kid’s neck, or wrist, or whatever, but they haven’t seen them giving both of their kids a piggyback around a hospital ward when their mom couldn’t, because she was swamped by paperwork.

And yes, the last few years have been leaning more towards finger-shaped bruises than piggybacks, but everyone’s been sort of leaning that way for a while now, right?

Down the hall, he can hear the radio flicker on. There’s a faint creak of a door opening, and Darcy’s loud laugh cuts in over the music.

“I’ll come over after school.”

She hums, and it’s low and steady and everything he knows his mother to be. “You better. I’ll need to check your stitches, I doubt Lennerson did a good job.”

“She did fine, mom-”

“You haven’t had stitches before! You need to know some basic maintenance!”

“They didn’t just stitch me up and sent me packing, they actually _told_ me things-”

“Did they give you ointment?”

“They said I didn’t need any. Look, I’ll come over and you can see everything after school, okay?”

“Okay,” she says. Then, like an afterthought: “I love you.”

“I know. You, too.”

“Give my love to your brother. Is he-”

“He’s fine, and I’ll tell him.”

“Okay. Love you.”

“I know. Bye.”

 

When he opens the door to the lounge, Darcy is smoothing yellow icing onto the cake with a steak knife.

“Shut up,” she says when Clint frowns at her. “The other ones were dirty. Pick up that plate; I’m nearly done.”

Bruce cranes his neck over into the kitchen. “You said I get the first piece.”

“I lied.” Darcy licks some of the excess icing from her thumb, and pushes the knife through the middle of the cake. “Clint, plate.” She grins, and it sets her face alight. “We’re having cake for breakfast, bitches.”

Clint brushes the breadcrumbs off a plate- they didn’t do the dishes yesterday after having toast- and holds it out until Darcy eases the slab of cake onto it, pushing it off the sticky knife with her sticky fingers.

She then grabs his hand with said sticky fingers and leans in so her face is propped up on his shoulder.

“So,” she says, and her voice is lowered, tickling the bottom of his ear along with the stitches. “Guess who came out with Tony from the spare room, like, thirty seconds ago?”

Clint laughs, his feet starting to warm up in the carpet, and thinks back to the both of them sitting on the couch when he walked in, and their identical twitching smiles. “Took them long enough.”

“You’re not talking as quiet as you think you are, and the walls are thin,” Steve yells from the lounge, and Clint flips him off even though there’s a wall between them.

 

They eat thick wedges of yellow cake with yellow icing, and the only reason it didn’t turn out to be a complete disaster is because of Clint’s multiple corrections, but he doesn’t tell Darcy that. Instead, he gives her elbow a squeeze and tells her she did a good job, and the beam he gets in return is worth the lack of taunting he gets to do.

Just before they’re out the door- it’s still raining, but only drizzling now, and Clint thinks it’s going to be another two-week rainfall- Pepper says, looking up from where she’s buttoning her coat, “Going to school without your jacket?”

Everyone else is either standing outside the car or running with their hands over their heads, and they’re all yelling for Pepper to hurry up and get the keys, even though it’s barely raining.

Clint adjusts his shoulders without thinking, but there’s nothing to push against except for his sleeves. He thinks, briefly, of his mother’s hospital scrubs, and how worn they’ve got to be by now.

“It’s back at the house,” he says, and Pepper doesn’t look away as her fingers find the buttons. “I left it there before the party. Leather and sand don’t really mix, y’know?”

She nods, and her hands come to tug the collar up. “Very wise.”

“Mm.”

The yelling increases in volume, and he hears Darcy start threatening to kick the window in, and Pepper locks the door behind them both with a twist of the keys before pointing them at the car.

Two high-pitched beeps, and a cheer goes up as they all duck into the car; with Clint and Pepper still on the porch.

 “We could pick it up on the way,” Pepper says. “We’d have to take a detour, though.”

He shrugs. “Nah. It was my dad’s jacket anyway.”

She nods, but doesn’t say anything, zipping her jacket over the buttons.

Clint is just about to start running before Pepper says, “Well, if it’s any consolation, I think you look a lot better without it.”

 

In the hospital, Clint didn’t talk much after discovering that it hurt when he tried.

Before Pepper got there, when Tony and Darcy went down the hall to get something from the vending machines and Steve went- somewhere, Clint was kind of past paying attention at that point.

Anyway, then it was just him and Bruce, and it was several different kinds of tense, all unwanted.

Clint was still hazy on the painkillers that had just started kicking in a few minutes ago, so he wet his lips.

“Where are my clothes?”

It came out as a croak, but it didn’t hurt as much as when he had tried to ask the last time.

Bruce didn’t startle. Instead, he looked up like he was expecting him to ask, and then nodded towards the windowsill. Under it, there was a see-through plastic bag, full of what Clint assumed was his clothes.

There was probably blood on them, but whatever.

Less than a minute passed- it wasn’t awkward, because of too many shared beds and family dinners and sticking next to each other when they go somewhere new, because no matter what, they have a built-in backup in the shape of a twin brother- and Clint said, “What?”

It was steadier than the last time, but still not back to normal.

Bruce looked up again from where he had been worrying at his nails with his teeth. “What what?”

“I asked first,” Clint said. “You have that face.”

Bruce said it through his nails: “What face?”

“That face like you’re gonna say something.”

For a second Bruce kept picking at his nails, and Clint saw blood edging the corners.

“Tony thinks it’s because of the car,” Bruce said eventually, like it was being yanked out of him. “The- your face. And ribs and- things. Are because dad saw the car.”

He was still looking Clint in the eyes even if it looked like it physically pained him to do so, since Clint had barely been able to see through his right eye, which was swollen half-shut.

When Clint didn’t say anything, Bruce hesitated before saying, “Tony is sorry, if that’s what happened. Like, he’s- he’s really, really sorry. He says he’ll pay for it.”

Clint let him sweat for a while before shrugging- it didn’t hurt as much as talking, but there was still a throb in his ribs when he did. “Doesn’t matter. It’s cool.”

Again, Bruce got that face- the pinched one, his mouth almost open, like he was going to say something. But after a few seconds it dissipated, and he looked down, swallowing.

“Sorry,” he said.

“Don’t you fucking dare,” Clint replied, steady and measured and not at all wobbling, and for the third time, Bruce looked up at him.

Clint blinked, hard, and it hurt. “Don’t,” he said. “Not your fault, Briony. None of it.”

And Bruce’s laugh had looked like it hurt just as much as it would hurt Clint, but he said what Clint hoped he would: “Shut up, Claire.”

Clint had smiled, a small, ticking one, but Bruce smiled right back at him.

 

Bruce ends up sitting on Steve’s lap because they run out of seats. As Steve strains the seatbelt over the both of them, Bruce makes a futile move to point out that this is illegal, and also that if anyone has to sit on Steve’s lap, it should be Tony.

Pepper turns around in the driver’s seat. “Unless we get pulled over, we’re fine. And don’t do anything stupid, like touch anything. But I agree with the second part of that,” she says, and winks at them all in the rear-view mirror.

“Ignoring that, you perverts,” Tony says, and then they’re pulling out of the driveway, the windshield wipers distorting everything as they drag over the glass.

It’s not different, Clint realizes. Steve and Tony, he means- he doesn’t know Steve that well, even after knowing him for more than two thirds of his life, but he knows Tony and he’s not acting any different, if you take away the goofy grinning that keeps popping up for no reason.

But Tony still hooked an eyebrow at Darcy for her bedhair, still bitched with Clint about the radio hosts, still made a sarcastic remark at Steve when he left the radio on Taylor Swift, and was still in general an asshole, and smirked the whole way through it.

And Steve, as he thinks he knows him, was still Steve- the same cereal (with a side of cake, because come on, no-one turns down the opportunity of cake for breakfast), the same shitty taste in music, the same nudge he gives Bruce when he wants him to change the channel.

They both still acted the same, but there was added touching and grinning and glances that didn’t end for a while.

All in all, it’s more amusing than anything else. That, and relieving, because Clint could only ignore so many heated stares across classrooms. Now they can follow through and save everyone the trouble of leaving, because honestly, those stares are suffocating to be in the presence of.

Now he’s pushed in next to Tony, and they’re not looking at each other, but they might as well be- their hands are sort of brushing, both on Steve’s knee.

Clint’s phone buzzes, and he has to wriggle his arm out from in between his side and Tony’s arm to get it free.

 

**_To: Clint:_ **

**_From: Darcy_ **

_I take it bak omg they better b jerking each other off in classrooms or something I physically cant take this fucking UST I h8 my life_

****

**_To: Darcy_ **

**_From: Clint_ **

_How can U even see this ur in the front seat. and we’ve been putting up with it for years wtf. now they just have shit to fuel it with. get used 2 it_

 

“I find that offensive,” Tony says, his neck shoving into Clint’s shoulder from when he had turned to read his phone.

Clint elbows him hard in the ribs, and he and Darcy say, “Fuck off,” at the same time.

 

When Pepper starts to pull up to the school, Clint tenses and the car stutters a bit.

“Ah,” Pepper says, noticing the several guys in varying hoodies- grey, black, and off-colour grey again, mostly- and the car starts to idle at the gutter. “Lovely. Should I-?”

“It’s fine,” Clint says, the lack of his jacket weighing on him more than ever, and he feels Tony’s chin shift when he looks at him.

Then everyone is sort of looking at him, and if they’re not, then they’re forcing themselves not to.

“It’s fine,” he repeats, and doesn’t elaborate on it.

Out the window, Skeet and a few others- Aaron, Mitch and Vix, whose real name he still doesn’t know after three semesters- are noticing the car, and who’s in it.

The rest of them notice in a bizarre Mexican wave of heads turning and people pointing, and Darcy mutters a swear through her fingers.

Clint opens the car door with a stiff jaw and a tight grip, and no-one says anything as his feet hit the concrete.

Skeet’s mouth moves, but the shout gets lost in the distance between them. A few more steps, and Clint hears, “Beef, what the fuck, man?”

Skeet’s always been the second-in-command, even if they ignore it. The right hand man, the guy people avoid almost as much as Clint, and he’s actually an okay guy, if you get him alone and his reputation isn’t being dragged along behind him.

Sometimes, Clint thinks that there has to be a rule to that- anyone, anywhere, is actually sort of a decent person if you find them at the right time and they don’t have anything to prove.

Behind him, he can hear car doors creaking, but he can’t tell if they’re opening or closing.

Skeet is looking between Clint and then over Clint’s shoulder, stuck between uncertainty and a sneer. “Dude.”

Clint’s shoulders are the kind of cold you get when you take away something that’s been there for a long time, and it’s only the third time he’s noticed it since the party ended.

He and Skeet come to a stop less than a meter apart, feet facing each other and fists at their sides.

He lifts his chin. “What?”

Skeet’s mouth ticks, like he’s not sure if this is a joke or not. Like any second now, Clint’s going to double back around and break everyone’s kneecaps, or something.

“Dude,” he repeats, his eyes flickering over Clint’s shoulder and then back to his face. “He wrecked your car.”

Clint can practically hear Tony’s internal freakout from a few feet away.

“It’s cool. We worked it out.”

“Yeah?” Skeet- actually, everyone behind him and even a few people craning their necks over the fence- is looking at his face, and the bruises like ink stamps; like he has one big bruise for a face with tiny bruise-swollen continents around the dark bruise-oceans, with stitches for the Great Wall of China and the Eiffel tower.

“Because it kinda looks like he kicked your ass, man. What’s up with that?”

“We worked it out,” Clint says again, and it has more razors in it than he means it to. “Leave it alone, Skeet.”

Again, the uncertain half-smirk, curling upwards before flatlining.

Then he’s stepping forwards, and Clint keeps his ground as Skeet says, “Leave it alone?”

“Did I stutter?”

Skeet’s bottom jaw juts out, a massive overbite pushing forwards. “Seems like I’ve been leaving a lot of things alone when it comes to you, Beef.”

And hey, Clint’s always been good at nudging people towards breaking point, so when it comes, his smile is solid.

“Yeah? You got a problem with it?”

For a second, he thinks Skeet is going to step down, like he always does. But there’s an audience, and at least two thirds of the Meats are standing behind Skeet, and Clint hasn’t heard Pepper drive away yet, so he doesn’t actually know who’s going to be behind him if he looks.

Skeet’s teeth meet, scraping the overbite back into a smile that is shaky, but stands nonetheless, which is kind of the Meat motto: do whatever you can get away with, and if you’re nervous, don’t let it show. Go in swinging and preferably under the influence of something, and don’t go down until there’s blood in places you didn’t know you could get blood in. Like your pubes.

Skeet’s shoulders come back, his eyes on Clint’s bruises- weak spots, out in the light for everyone to see, and he says, “Yeah. Yeah, actually I do.”

At a glance over Skeet’s rapidly growing shoulders, Clint can see at least half of the Meats taking hesitant or not-so-hesitant steps forwards, ready to back one of them up.

There are a few that are hanging back- among them are Aaron, Kenny and Dean, all of whom are people Clint would actually consider keeping in contact with when he leaves high school, rather than the others who Clint would leave at the side of the road without looking back, and probably revving the engine so dirt and dust got them right in the face- but other than that, they’re all coming forwards, albeit some of them slower than others.

Clint thinks back to the action movie they watched two nights ago- the one-eyed captain had dropped to his knees and screamed _mutiny_ , over and over, and started banging on the door of the submarine as his crew shoved desks in front of it.

There’s no submarine and Clint isn’t going to drop to his knees or throw back his head and scream _munity_ , but there’s the same sort of feel to it.

And he’s not exactly sure what he’s supposed to do or not to with his stiches, but he thinks getting punched is definitely not going to help them heal.

Skeet looks- well, he doesn’t look like he’s going to back off, but he doesn’t look fully on board with this, either.

But his fist comes back, and the only thing Clint can think of in that moment as he mirrors the gesture is _my mother is going to fucking kill me if I rip these stitches_.


	23. Chapter 23

It’s not the Stupidest Thing Tony has done, but it’s in the top ten. Maybe the top twenty.

At the very least, it’s high up there in the top thirties.

It is one of the many and varied Stupid Things he has done, and unlike most of the many and varied Stupid Things he’s done, it doesn’t end up with him throwing up in someone’s toilet.

The Stupid Thing that he’s doing right now involves his fist and Skeet’s already-bleeding face, which Clint has punched twice. They were kind of pitiful, flailing punches, but Skeet’s lip is bleeding, so they totally count.

Clint isn’t struggling as he gets yanked away by the back of his shirt by Darcy and Steve, and Tony is-

Well, Tony doesn’t really have time to think about it when he’s taking the four steps it takes to get close enough to punch Skeet, and then his hand is coiling back and it impacts into the hard edge of Skeet’s cheekbone, making his head snap backwards, almost slipping over on the sodden grass, and then a good portion of Tony’s hand is on fucking _fire_ -

He’s dimly aware of swearing loudly through the sparking haze, and of Pepper’s voice cutting through everyone else’s yells, and someone is punching someone else, but none of the punchers or punch-ees are anyone he cares about, so that’s okay.

“Don’t even try it,” Pepper snaps at Skeet, her fingers bunched in the front of his shirt, and her hand is getting dotted with the blood from his mouth.

And there are others, because there are always others, and Steve’s hand is closing around his shoulder, and Darcy saying, “Fuck, Tony, are you-”

“I think I broke my hand,” Tony hears himself say, and said hand is being held close to his chest, not touching his shirt. Every movement he makes sends a bolt down it, making him hiss.

Then he’s babbling, random strings of words that he’s only half-noticing as he says them, and Steve is pulling him back towards the car, and some guy he doesn’t know is yanking Skeet back towards the fence, and Tony is being manhandled through the door of a car before he can register anything other than ‘holy fuck, this is incredibly painful.’

 

The drive to the hospital is punctuated by Tony’s occasional: “Definitely broke it, holy fucking Christ, this is the worst pain that has ever been experienced by anyone ever in the entire cosmos, oh my _god_.”

“Stop being such a fucking drama queen,” Darcy says, and the car goes over a bump so the sudden spike of pain makes Tony bite down on ‘yeah, you can talk,’ since Darcy had only just stopped freaking out less than two minutes ago.

Pepper’s car is piled up to the brim again, and this time Darcy is sitting on Bruce, who looks pretty squished under her. Not that she’s overweight, or even big-boned, Bruce is just- well, incredibly undersized for his age.

“I’m really, really sorry,” Clint says, for what’s got to be the thousand-and-second time, and Tony waves him off with his good hand.

“Totally fine,” he says through his teeth. “Makes us even. Except for the fact that his jaw _broke my fucking hand_.”

His teeth come together in a vice as they go over a pothole, and Pepper looks over at him apologetically. “Sorry.”

“Tooootally fine,” Tony croaks, and tries not to jolt as the car turns a corner and his arm gets nudged by the gearstick, jarring his hand.

“ _Fuck_ ,” he spits, manoeuvring it up in the air again, held awkwardly aloft.

Darcy swats him in the back of the head- she’s always physical when she doesn’t know what else to do, it’s one of the things she has in common- and says, “Stop swearing.”

Tony doesn’t even bother replying to that. Instead, he leans into Steve’s hand, which is still on his shoulder, because somehow, he’s managed to keep it there for the entire duration of the ride. Tony doesn’t know how he did it, but he’s not complaining.

And he’s gritting his teeth and still swearing occasionally past the pain, but Steve’s hand is still there, body heat against body heat, and it’s sort of nothing and everything in one fluid, repetitive motion as he smoothes his thumb over the groove in Tony’s neck.

 

Last night hadn’t been the best sleep he ever had. It wasn’t his bed, there was a spring down by his feet that poked out and kept stabbing into his ankle, and when he shifted to get comfortable, the pillow was damp with sweat. Also, there was a fucking furnace pressed along his side, and Tony couldn’t remember what it was.

Finally, at around 3 in the morning, after blearily coming in and out of consciousness, he flipped over again to try to get a better position, and his arm hit something atrociously warm for a bed that’s already boiling.

The warm thing muttered, “Ow,” and it wasn’t until Tony forced his eyes open and turned his head that he remembered, Oh.

“Sorry,” Tony said, half of his mouth pressed flat into the pillow, the muddle of sleep dulling the shock of remembering _shit shit shit Steve is in my bed holy fuck_. “Forgot. Promise not to hit you again. Go to sleep.”

Steve squinted over at the clock, which was blaring blue at him. “”S three in the morning.”

“Again,” Tony said, “oops. Also, you’re very, very warm and it’s killing me, could I please shove the duvet to your side?”

It sounded weird- ‘your side,’ like this is the usual routine. Like it’s normal to be woken up at 3 and start arguing over who gets the sheets. Like Steve always comes in at night and slips in beside Tony.

But Steve either didn’t notice or didn’t care, and Tony leaned towards the latter, because it was early and they were both half-asleep and Tony couldn’t bring himself to care about much at that moment.

“Sure,” Steve said, and Tony had to wait a while to get the motivation to bring his arms up and peel the duvet away from the sheet, nudging it over to Steve, who takes the bundle and pushes it over the side, dragging the sheet with it slightly.

Tony slumps back down. “Thanks. ‘M burning over here.”

“Mm,” Steve says. “You sweat a lot in your sleep.”

Tony grunts. “It’s a thing. Prob’ly medical. Dunno.”

On some level, a part of him was screaming at him to shut the fuck up because he was digging the hole deeper than it already was, but he was too tired to pay attention to it.

The fingers that touched his chin were just as hot as the rest of him, and it took a second for Tony to realize that his eyes had closed again.

He opened them, and he saw that Steve didn’t have to reach out much to trace the fading bruises on Tony’s chin.

He didn’t say _does it hurt_ or _I’m glad you’re okay_ or anything at all, really, and they lay there and Steve didn’t press hard, just let his fingers drift across them, and then back over. He brushed his thumb past the ribbed scab on Tony’s bottom lip, feather-light, and then in a soft line down the yellowing bruises on his jaw.

For a moment Tony wondered what it would be like to be sorted into a constellation, if the astronomer looked up through the ink and filled in the spaces between the dots with lines, if they had to push to make them fit.

He wondered if, in that situation, he was the astronomer or the constellations, because Steve’s hands were cooling slowly against his skin and he was looking at him, into him, and his smile was the kind of soft you’d get from something that’s never been touched.

Distantly, Tony felt a swell in the bottom of his gut and then filling his stomach, bloating his lungs, pressing into his kidney, forcing its way up his throat- he still didn’t know what it was, because he’s never been good at putting a name to things- and Steve’s eyes were full of something that he kind of recognized as being the same thing.

And he thought he should say something, and Steve was still touching Tony carefully, like he was an explorer, mapping him out with clumsy fingers, still stupid with sleep.

It was quiet and thudding and it should’ve been awkward, should’ve been fumbling, but it was just Steve’s long, skinny fingers on Tony’s long, skinny chin and neither of them were very much awake at all, and Tony kept thinking he should say something, but instead he was sinking further into the bed.

Tony was more than almost asleep a few minutes later, his eyes drifting closed and then blinking back open when he found himself mumbling, “Y’know, they’re going to think we slept together,” into the otherwise silent room.

There was always something about saying something in a silent room, he noticed. The words fell heavier than they should.

“We did sleep together,” Steve said immediately, and his eyes had been closed for a while. “We are sleeping together. I just slept for a few hours and you were in the bed with me.”

Tony laughed at that, a soft huff against Steve’s palm. “I realize that we are currently in the act of sleeping together, but you know what I mean. Sleeping together. Like, not getting much sleeping done during it.”

Steve frowned, and his eyebrows came together. “We won’t be getting much sleeping done if you don’t shut up.”

Tony laughed again, and it landed on Steve’s palm in the exact same place as last time.

 

The hospital is only just in sight, the corner of it peeking around the street, when Pepper brakes at a red light.

“Fu-u- _uck_ ,” Tony groans, his head lolling backwards. “I’m going to die. I’m going to die and that privileged dickwad with diamond-plated cheekbones is going to reign supreme at school. I hate life. I hate everything.”

He rakes in a hot breath as the pain spikes, supernova jolts of dark crimson and bright white bursting under his eyelids when he squeezes his eyes closed for a second.

When he opens them, the lights are still red and Pepper’s indicator is ticking rapidly, green-black, green-black, and Tony manages through tight lips, “This hurts like a _bitch_.”

Steve’s  hand shifts slightly on Tony’s shoulder as he leans forwards to align his mouth with Tony’s ear, but talks loud enough for everyone to hear him when he says, “Can I just say that right now, you sound unbelievably American?”

Tony chokes more than he laughs, but it sort of works and he stops seeing random pulses of light out of the corner of his eyes when he blinks.

The light is stubbornly staying red, and Tony thinks it’s been more than thirty seconds since a car came past, so it’s safe to say he’s being fair when he kicks the dashboard- he sort of ruins it because he kicks softly so not to move his hand in any way, shape or form- and yells, “OH COME ON.”

It bleeds together into one big garbled yell- _ohcomeon_ , at the top of his lungs and straining his voice and utterly, depressingly ineffective.

“Come on, lights,” Steve says, and it hits Tony so hard that he laughs again, ripping out of him and probably clipping his hand with his chest, because another throb of pain works its way through, less intense than the others but still enough to make him queasy.

Steve says, “We believe in you, lights,” and Tony says, “I hate you, Jesus fucking Christ,” but he’s laughing, so it’s wobbly in the middle.

Darcy says, “There haven’t been any cars in forever, what the fuck,” and her knee pushes a bit into the back of Tony’s seat as she leans up.

“Come the fuck on, lights,” Clint says, and Tony is still laughing, trying to tamp it down for the sake of his fucking hand, but it’s hard, because now Pepper is starting to swear under her breath and tap the wheel.

Bruce says, “This is taking so much longer than usual,” and Darcy yells, “HURRY THE FUCK UP, LIGHTS,” and Clint yells it louder.

Then everyone’s screaming abuse at the traffic lights and Steve finally starts swearing at them after another few seconds pass and they still don’t change.

Tony is laughing and it aches, both in his hand and his ribs, and Darcy’s voice is reaching a pitch that’s only applicable to dog whistles and secret government tracking devices just as the lights snap to green.

Steve starts to clap, his hand sliding from Tony’s shoulder, and Tony would clap with him if one of his hands weren’t mangled to shit, and Darcy is cheering and Clint whoops and Pepper pushes the gas pedal.

They pull into a carpark just outside the hospital and Tony splashes rainwater up his jeans when he steps in the gutter getting out of the car. His shoes and socks get soaked through, and he stares at them for a second before stepping out onto the sidewalk.

He uses his good hand to grab one of Steve’s when he gets close enough.

Steve doesn’t ask why, he just squeezes, hard and fast.

Tony says, smiling almost shakily, “And it’s not even ten o’clock yet.”

 

Even though it’s a different time of day than the last time they came, the lighting hasn’t changed.

 _Hospitals are basically as close to purgatory as you can get. They’re perpetually the same few hours over and over_ , someone told Tony once, and he can’t be bothered to remember who, but he thinks it was his uncle, maybe.

The nurse- tall, frizzy strawberry-blonde hair, bulimia thin- barely looks up. “What-”

“I’m dying a slow and painful death because my friend’s ex-friend is an asshole with lethal fucking cheekbones,” Tony blurts. At the same time, Pepper says, “He thinks he broke his hand.”

“I _did_ break my hand,” Tony says.

“You _think_ you broke it, you melodramatic whiner,” Pepper corrects him before turning to the nurse. “Could we get him an x-ray, please?”

The nurse raises her eyebrows at the both of them, then at everyone flanking them- Bruce at the end with half his fingernails on one hand in his mouth, then Darcy with her nails digging into the fleshy part of her knuckles, then Steve with his fingers at Tony’s good wrist, then Tony with his bad hand lofted, then Pepper with her arms at her side, then Clint with both hands in his pockets.

The nurse has her glossy-pink fingernails (which Tony thinks has got to be against regulation, there is no way they’d let a nurse have nails like that) curled around a clipboard.

She nods towards Pepper. “You’re his parent?”

Pepper’s nostrils flare, before her lips come into a thin line that she pushes into a smile that could maim and possibly kill babies, toddlers and any child under the age of eight.

Tony doesn’t think he’s seen someone’s nostrils flare in real life before. It’s vaguely terrifying but mostly awesome.

 

He has his first x-ray- the first one he can remember, anyway, because apparently he had one when he was three and they thought he had sprained his ankle, but it turned out to just be twisted and that Tony was, in fact, just a melodramatic whiner- and asks the nurse three times if he can smoke while he’s doing it before she tells him to shut up.

She tells him again when he asks her if the x-ray is going to give him the ability to quadruple in size while going green and/or make lasers shoot out of his eyes, and he supposes that’s fair enough, since she probably has to deal with idiotic teenagers more than the average mid-twenties year old.

Except for Pepper, of course.

 

“Five bucks says it’s broken,” Darcy says, linking her fingers together behind her head, under her hair so it spills outwards.

“It’s not broken,” Pepper sighs. “His hand, at least. His thumb’s definitely broken, and probably some of his fingers, but not his hand.”

“What makes you think that?”

Pepper fixes Tony with a look, her lips pursing. “Because I saw that pathetic excuse for a punch, you absolute pillock. Your thumb was inside your fist.”

Darcy beats Clint to it: “Oh my fucking god, Tony, seriously? Have you not _watched_ any cop shows?”

It’s a shuttered sense of deja-vu, and Tony remembers couches and rice and Pepper jabbing at him with a fork, and last but not least, demonstrating a punch into a pillow.

“I wasn’t _thinking_ ,” Tony says, one side of his face scrunching. “Come on! I had less than three seconds to react, and-”

“Basic laws of every single fucking cop show,” Darcy talks over him, waving a hand. “Try not to punch them bone to bone, every lock is easily pickable, _do not tuck your thumb inside your fist when you throw a punch_ , and if you dye your hair you are instantly unrecognizable to everyone, including your family and closest friends. I am so ashamed of you right now.”

“I’m sure I’ll live,” Tony says, and tries to find a way to execute a grumpy bite into an apple. It’s harder than it looks, plus he has to hold it with his left hand, so it constantly feels wrong.

They all look up when the nurse comes in, and it’s a different one than before.

“Sorry about the delay,” she says, beaming a rehearsed smile that she’s been streamlining so long that it looks more natural than the genuine smiles of most people at school that Tony has seen lately.

She lifts the clipboard- seriously, do they have them on their person at all times so they can whip it out towards the next person- and skims the page. “So, Tony Stark, was it?”

“Guilty.”

“We’re going to have to get a cast on your hand.” Her eyes are going from him to the chart and back again. “You broke your thumb, but it’s not a big concern- it’s a non-displaced fracture, so you won’t need surgery.”

Until this very second, it hadn’t occurred to Tony that people would need surgery for a broken bone. Now that he thinks about it, he’s kind of ashamed he didn’t realize it before.

She lowers the chart, and then the smile is back, wide and one-hundred watts. “Apart from that, you have a minor sprain in your index finger. You should be just fine.”

“Oh, good,” Tony says. “Hey, do I get time off school?”

“You could get _suspended_ ,” Pepper says, faux-cheerful. “Do we even know who was watching when you punched that guy?”

“Skeet,” Clint provides.

Pepper pushes her tongue over her top teeth, closing her eyes briefly like she’s asking for patience. “Skeet,” she repeats, and Tony can tell she’s rolling her eyes on the inside. “When you punched Skeet.”

“His real name’s Tommy,” Clint says, turning in his seat to face her. It’s not a threat, it’s just- holding each other’s gaze for a few seconds, and something like understanding flickers in Pepper’s face.

“Tommy, then,” she says, and she leans over, bumping their shoulders together.

Clint looks mildly surprised and doesn’t even bother hiding it, but sways sideways along with it.

Tony finds himself wondering how many things Clint has swayed with- if he went rigid at a punch, or if he just moved with it instead of against it.

If that’s what they’re all doing, maybe- moving with the punches, or stiffening so when the impact finally comes, it hurts all the more.


	24. Chapter 24

After doing the paperwork- and getting a cast around Tony’s hand and down his arm that most of them have either signed/drawn penises on them, and Tony has hit both Darcy and Clint with the cast because the opportunity was too sweet to pass up- they all head back out into the rain.

It looks like a cast someone would get for a broken arm, but it goes out over the most of his hand, his broken thumb sticking out to the side. His index and middle finger are curled down in bulky plaster which is the kind of pink that twelve year old girls paint their rooms (courtesy of Darcy, and Tony is starting to sense a pattern here).

He flexes his three free right fingers, and it hits him then that he’s not going to be able to flip anyone off until the cast comes off. He’s more depressed about that than he should be.

Pepper doesn’t complain when she sees the soggy parking tickets- plural, very much plural- wedged in between her windshield wipers; barely gives them a second glance as she pushes the hair out of her face and fumbles for her keys.

Tony watches as she tries to pry the tickets out with the hand not holding the keys, but they come to pieces in her fingers, so she leaves wet paste-paper on the glass and wipes the rest of it on her jeans before getting in the car.

“So,” she says, and ignores the rain dripping from her hair down the back of her shirt. “I’m going to take a wild guess and say I’m not driving you lot back to school, due to the fact that there’s less than two hours of it to go?”

Tony rearranges his arm so his cast doesn’t shove into the handbreak and shoots her a distracted grin as he does. “Sure, let’s go with that.”

“This isn’t technically skipping school, anyway,” Darcy says, climbing onto Steve’s lap and ignoring it when he makes an annoyed sound in the back of his throat. “We have a legitimate reason. Well, Tony does. But we were there for moral support.”

Pepper gives her the stink eye in the rear-view mirror as she adjusts it, but she can’t stop the smile. “Not to be a Debbie downer, but you’re all going tomorrow.”

She gives her hair a once-over before glancing back at them, talking over their collective groan. “And don’t worry. Knowing high schoolers, they’ll either leave you all alone completely-”

The car jitters, and Pepper stops for a second to swear at it before pulling further out into the road, less jerky but still not smooth.

“-or kick the living crap out of every single one of you,” she finishes, and twists the steering wheel so they swerve into the right lane.

Tony’s smile is less distracted this time, but it’s dry and full of too many crappy things happening in the span of less than 24 hours, which, in the last few months he’s grown more accustomed to than he’d like. “Thank you, Pepper. That was very helpful.”

“It’s what I’m here for,” she says, and flips the windshield wipers on, smearing a shred of parking ticket across the glass.

When they drive under the traffic lights, Tony says, “Thanks for not being an ass this time, you stubborn bastard,” and gets a few warm laughs for it.

 

Some of them have to go soon- Clint has to meet his mom at the clinic in a few hours, Pepper has to go to an appointment that she’s rescheduled twice, and Darcy’s parents get shifty if she just texts them instead of coming home-but for now, they’re on the road to Pepper’s, and Darcy is almost falling asleep on Steve’s lap, and Tony keeps forgetting he has a cast and then remembering when he tries to move his right hand.

It’s overcast, which always makes it seem later than it is, and Bruce’s head keeps almost dropping sideways against Clint’s shoulder.

For some reason, Tony puts a lot of hope into that: in the fact that Clint won’t push away if Bruce does let his head rest on his shoulder. In Darcy and her long hair, pillowing in between her cheek and Steve’s neck when she leans back. In Pepper’s hands, solid on the steering wheel and turning the indicator on a few seconds before she needs to.

In Steve and his checkered green pants that Tony can’t bring himself to loathe like he thinks he used to; in Steve’s small smile when he catches his eye, in the terrifyingly genuine smile Tony gives him back.

In the rain streaking everything outside; and it’s falling harder now.

 

When they’re shaking the water off their jackets on the porch of Pepper’s house, she makes them take their shoes off, because they’ve all tracked through mud walking up the lawn.

“Just throw them wherever,” she says, toeing off her flats.

Another pair of flats- scuffed red, as opposed to Pepper’s polished blue- from Darcy are shoved in next to the door, followed by Clint’s combat boots, then Steve’s sneakers, and Tony frowns down at Bruce’s sandals as he lines them up neater than everyone else’s.

“Shut up,” Bruce warns as Tony opens his mouth.

Tony’s mouth twitches, and his zip-up-boots lie on top of each other next to Pepper’s shoes.

“Fuck,” Darcy says as she ducks inside, making a beeline for the heater. She rubs her hands through her hair, and they come out wet. “It’s been raining forever.”

Bruce shrugs, but it turns into a shiver when the door closes and cold air knifes into him before the air from the heater does.

“It’ll stop eventually,” he says.

 

Although they’ve showered, none of them have gotten a change of clothes since they got there on Saturday (every single one of them have borrowed Pepper’s comb to brush their hair in the mornings and Pepper still hasn’t forgiven any of them for it), so Pepper goes through her attic- she arms herself with bugspray before she starts climbing, and Tony sits near the ladder and occasionally yells to ask if the spiders have taken her over yet- and comes out with some semi-wearable clothes, mostly from her old live-in boyfriend, who Tony knows to avoid talking about by now.

The shirt she gives Darcy barely fits across her chest, and in the end she shucks it and gives her a hockey jersey instead, saying it’ll work for the meantime. Apart from that, she gets a pair of green board shorts that people are supposed to wear swimming.

Clint gets a pair of jeans that cut off just above his ankles and a black v-neck; Bruce gets a pair of sweatpants that sag everywhere, a singlet and a grey flannel shirt with a rip in one of the sleeves.

Steve gets Hawaiian shorts and a shirt almost identical to Bruce’s flannel one, except for the stripe down the side and the fabric that cracks when he unfolds it.

“Have I mentioned,” Tony says as he pulls on a baggy wifebeater and then a woollen jersey over the top of it, “that I loathe you in every single way imaginable?”

Pepper looks innocently up at him from the couch, where she’s been watching everyone pull on their shitty clothes and trying not to laugh. “Hey, I’m not making you wear any of these. If you want, you can change back into your sweaty old clothes. I’m just enjoying the show.”

Tony arches an eyebrow. “Why Pepper, you delightfully obvious pervert.”

“Not like that, you nimrod,” Pepper sighs. “You should know by now that I find immense enjoyment from everyone’s embarrassment. Namely, yours.”

She pushes herself up off the couch and starts towards the kitchen, latching onto Tony’s elbow as she does and dragging him with her. “Now come on, I’m going to show you how to cover that cast when you get in the shower.”

“I have to cover it?”

“No, you lug it around while it’s dripping everywhere,” Pepper says, opening a draw and sorting through it with both hands. “Of course you cover it.”

From the lounge, Bruce says, “Ah, rubbish bag. My old nemesis. It was the very worst part about breaking my leg.”

“Rubbish bag?” Tony frowns, looking from Pepper to the drawer she’s going through, and connecting the two. “No fucking way. I’m not putting a rubbish bag on my arm and you can’t make me.”

“Don’t be such a baby,” Darcy calls from where she’s trying to shove a new jersey over her head, and Steve talks over her, leaning against the doorframe to the kitchen: “Getting your cast wet can make your arm infected.”

Tony pauses. “Infected?”

“Infected,” Steve nods. “It can fall off. Rot and gangrene and everything-”

“You’re a horrible person, I nearly believed that,” Tony says, and Steve’s smile accelerates.

No-one else has had this, Tony realizes, as Pepper’s hair falls in her face and Darcy announces that she’s officially stuck in the fucking jersey and is going to suffocate and die if someone doesn’t help her out of it in the next ten seconds.

No-one else has had these people like this, in this house, saying these things, feeling these things.

No-one else has been sort-of-hopefully-dating Steve Rogers as the naked light from the hanging kitchen bulb strikes Steve across the face while their not-really-therapist is going through a drawer for a rubbish bag to keep his cast dry when he showers. No-one’s ever stood in this spot, in this room, in this town, in this freezing kitchen with bare feet and felt what he’s feeling right now, high in his throat and low in his lungs.

And it’s too full, spilling everywhere, pricking through his skin and down over the tiles and creeping up, up, up, and Tony feels it with everything he’s ever been and whoever the fuck he’s going to be. And it’s not happiness, but it’s definitely stuck somewhere in the clutter of whatever it is, along with fear and pleasure and shoved in with everything else he paid attention to in Psych class.

And he still sucks at articulating important things that should be batshit simple, and Steve is still smiling at him with hazy eyes and he can hear Darcy yelling at Clint in the lounge as he tries to get the jersey loose, and Tony lets himself remember this, lets it sink down deep to somewhere he can catch it and save it for later.

“Got it,” Pepper crows, and he turns to her as she gleefully holds up a roll of black rubbish bags, and a packet of rubber bands.

Tony blinks, and the moment isn’t gone, exactly, it’s just stretching thin.

He looks down at her hands, and what’s in them. “What are the rubber bands for?”

“To hold the bag in place,” Pepper says. “Duh.”

It takes a second until it clicks, and then:

“I loathe you,” Tony says, “In every s-”

“Every single way imaginable,” Pepper and Steve say in unison, and the moment stretches, and expands out and out until Tony is grinning like he’s never going to stop.

 

They introduce Pepper to ‘Secrets,’ and everyone bursts out laughing when she tells them that when she was nineteen, she was making her mother’s bed and found a purple, glittery vibrator in between the sheets.

Tony has already heard this, but he laughs anyway.

“Scarred me for life,” Pepper says, leaning back, her sprawl too loose, and it’s like that: smiling too loosely, speaking too loosely, loose limbs and eyes and mouths and Tony doesn’t even realize his cast-arm is curled over Steve’s shoulders until Steve gets up to turn on the radio.

When he sits back down, Tony’s cast-arm is sort of casually in the same place, but along the frame of the couch.

Tony starts to casually- ‘casually’ being the key word here, his position is casual and his tone when he talks to Pepper is casual and everything is so. Fucking. Casual.

But most of all it’s nauseatingly casual how he’s slowly inching his cast-arm out from under Steve’s head so it doesn’t shove into the back of Steve’s neck like it must be doing.

Or, at least, this is the plan, before Steve shifts after about thirty seconds, reaches back, grabs Tony’s pink cast and drapes it over his shoulders where it was before; Tony’s half-plaster hand over the beginning of the stripe on Steve’s shirt.

At Tony’s wide eyes, he smiles, and the blotted freckle near his ear bunches like it always does when his smile gets a bit too wide.

“You were taking too long,” he says, and Tony loves him for it, loves him in spite of it, and loves him because of his freckles and his crumpled shirt; loves him and his pushed-back hair. Loves him because he makes Tony’s pulse skate in places it shouldn’t; because of the incredible, measured-out intensity of how Steve _is_ \- the furnace-like quality of his skin at night, or anytime of the day, actually, and the exaggerated dip in his hipbones; the shape and the hazy blue shade of his eyes when it’s getting dark outside like it is now.

He loves him and he’s hugely, devastatingly hyper-aware of it, the same way you’d be aware of the cast on your arm every time you went to move it: the sudden, startling abundance of something heavy and impossible to miss.

 

Pepper drives Clint to the clinic and Darcy to her house before going to her appointment, which leaves Bruce, Tony and Steve in the house, quoting their way through all two and a half Monty Python movies.

Or, well, Tony sits against the arm of the couch and watches the both of them bounce the quotes off each other almost flawlessly- they already know which lines to let each other say, it’s adorable- and stifles laughter and something else, because it’s blindingly obvious how many years they’ve been watching the movies, hunched around Bruce’s laptop or the family TV, or whatever television Steve has at his house.

After sitting through the first movie- Tony finds it funny in some parts, hilarious in other and punctuated by several scenes which are just downright sodding stupid- he leans over to Steve and asks, “Hey, what kind of TV do you have at your house?”

“What?”

“What kind of TV do you have at your house?”

“…a square one?”

Tony snorts and Steve is looking up at him, like, _why are you asking about my television?_

“Never mind,” Tony tells him, and Steve still looks confused, but he says, “Okay, I won’t,” and misses the next line in the movie that he was supposed to say.

 

Darcy comes back to Pepper’s first, swearing and kicking off her shoes and not even saying hello before she bundles up everyone’s damp clothes and kicks the door to the laundry open, because apparently she’s kicking everything today.

She dumps everything in, pours in more detergent than strictly necessary, slams the lid down and stabs the ‘start’ button.

Tony cranes his neck so he can see into the laundry room. “I take it your parents were their usual lovely selves.”

“Fuck off,” Darcy yells from where she’s adjusting the settings, and she’s even managing to do that moodily.

She stalks into the lounge, turns off the Monty Python movie- both Steve and Bruce look at each other, silently acknowledging that if they complain, they’ll most likely get kicked, viciously and repeatedly- and rolls down the channels until she gets to a talk show that Tony doesn’t recognize.

They watch that in careful silence until Darcy’s posture relaxes slightly, but none of them push and Darcy doesn’t tell them anything. Eventually Tony makes a remark about the absolute and utter stupidity of the participants of talk shows, and Darcy says, “I know, right,” and leans back into the couch, so that’s okay, sort of.

 

Clint and Pepper get back one after the other, both carrying a bag each, see-through and heavy with toothbrushes and takeout- samosas, mostly- and they eat half of it during a long argument over which movie to watch next.

Tony excuses himself at the end of the next movie to take a shower, and glares at Pepper the entire time she’s wrapping the rubbish bag around his cast.

“Loathing,” he says as she snaps the rubber bands into place. “In colourful, varied ways, and all directed at you.”

She just laughs, pinging a rubber band, and for a second, Tony lets himself think that it can always be like this: Indian food and old movies and everyone lying over each other and wrestling for the best seat on the couch, Sheldon Cooper style.

He showers, towels himself dry, and then shaves- which ends up horribly, because it turns out that it’s hard as shit to shave with your non-dominant hand, and he litters cuts all down the left side of his jaw (pressing down as light as he can on the bruises) before giving up and throwing the razor (Pepper’s, and almost the same pink as his cast) in the sink.

Before he goes back out into the lounge, he shells out a cigarette and the box of matches from behind the sink- he shoved a pack of them plus the matches back there in sophomore year, when he had just gotten used to going over to Pepper’s house and- and- well, he’s pretty sure he was drunk and thought it’d be a good idea at the time.

He congratulates his past self with a cigarette-salute, with it pinched between his good fingers- again, awkward as fuck to hold- as he touches them to his forehead.

He breathes in hard and long, until the cigarette is almost down to the filter, and stubs it out in the leftover water in the sink where the match has burnt itself out. Then he scoops them both up with his hands and puts them at the bottom of the rubbish bag he had used around his arm, before putting that in the bathroom bin and leaving the bathroom.

Pepper looks at him suspiciously when he walks into the lounge, because she has the nose of a fucking bloodhound, but Clint cuts off whatever she’s going to say with, “Dude, did you only shave _half_ of your face?”

Tony pushes out his chin, and everyone’s eyes gravitate towards it as he says, “I have no idea what you are referring to, Clint.”

And he knows he’s got to look like a prize idiot- pink cast on his arm, fading bruises on his half-shaved chin, wet hair and a smudged patch of shaving cream on the neckline of his shirt and the top of his decidedly stupid pink cast where he had tried to wipe it off.

“Dude,” Clint repeats, and his lips are curling upwards, and Bruce is right beside him, skinny and pale-haired and basically the antithesis of anything Clint’s ever done, and they’re leaning into each other.

They’re all leaning into each other, actually, now that he looks around- Pepper is sitting on the floor with her head on Bruce’s knee, Steve is beside her with his arm pressing into Clint’s leg and Bruce has his head in Clint’s lap, whose arm is slung out over the couch.

And Tony- Tony lets it sink in again, bits and pieces falling into place or out of place or becoming something new altogether.

 

They don’t pass up the opportunity to sleep in the spare room, per se, they just find their eyes closing and the TV gets turned off at some point and then Tony opens his eyes and it’s seven-thirty in the morning and they’ve all slept in the lounge, including Pepper, who sits up with creases in her cheek from the carpet.

“The _fuck_ ,” are Darcy’s first words upon awakening on the floor.

“Seconded,” Tony agrees. He uses his good arm to push himself up, and his cast to hit Bruce on the back of the head. “Oi, get up. Time to rise and shine.”

 

Darcy takes a twelve-minute shower, followed by Bruce’s three-minute one, and they all manage to down a cup of something before they have to leave- hot chocolate for Steve, water for Bruce and instant coffee for everyone else, and in the middle of Darcy haggling Pepper for another trip up to the attic, Tony looks over at Steve.

He means it to be a quick glance- like, looking around the room for lack of things to do- but suddenly he can’t stop looking at the slow curve of his neck, at the freckle he kissed last night after years mounting on years of thinking about kissing it, at the tiny baby hairs at the nape of his neck, and realizes that he’s totally fine with learning all of these places one at a time for as long as he can draw it out for.

Tony leans forwards, and taps Steve on the shoulder.

“Hi,” he says, and kisses him.

He kisses him because he wants to, and because he can, and Steve tastes like hot chocolate and Tony tastes like coffee and they’re both grinning into the kiss, which turns out to be a hard thing to kiss around.

It’s not a long kiss- mostly because Darcy lobs a cushion at them, and Tony throws it right back at her, but she ducks it.

When he turns back to Steve, there’s colour high in his cheeks.

“I thought you hated coffee.”

Steve shrugs and kisses him again, barely brushing his lips, quick and light and still enough to make his grin widen. “I didn’t notice.”

 

The rain looks like it’s starting to let up when Tony is pulling on his boots on the porch, and he thinks it’s about fucking time.

Darcy bends to slip her flats over her ankles, and glances out. “It’s about fucking time.”

“My thoughts exactly,” Tony says, and then looks up at Pepper, who is locking the door. “Hey, you should take us for a driving lesson someday.”

“I’d rather screw a horse in a vat of boiling acid,” Pepper replies, meeting his eyes and smiling tightly.

“Well, that’s a bit harsh.”

Pepper hums, pocketing her keys. “I heard what you did to Clint’s car.”

“I was _drunk_!”

“So obviously you’re a responsible driver who I would consider actually letting behind the wheel of my car, which I _paid_ for,” Pepper says, and reaches down to help him up. “Come on.”

The rain has almost died down completely by the time Tony steps out in it, and he can only just see Pepper’s car parked on the curb.

And they have to go to school and face the music, whether the music is getting their faces individually punched in or getting shunned in the halls or fuck knows what else, and Clint is wearing a ridiculously puffy jersey with missed stitches and a bad design of a pear tree, and Darcy is saying something about her phone getting wet, and no-one has ever felt like this, in mid-step down a muddy path.

And Tony has no idea what’s going to happen except that he’s going to wedge in a cigarette somewhere in there, and water is running down his collar and he still has this, he still has his misguided, fucked up and fucked over, bruised and bruising pack of strays are behind him and in front of him and off to the side.

He still has the mud on his boots, and the mark on Skeet’s cheek, and everyone shouting over each other in the car as the traffic lights flickers to green, and the radio’s on and they’re watching a bad action scene and dissing each other’s crappy attic clothes, and they’re coasting past the traffic lights while it’s raining and Tony is getting used to the weight on his arm.

He still has bare feet in the kitchen, he still has the taste of coffee and hot chocolate on the inside of his cheek. And when it comes down to it, he’s still going to have that shifting, crystallized moment in the passenger’s seat with his good hand on the knob of the radio, and on the couch with his feet on Clint’s shoulders, and everyone in a line, squeezing all of their pinkies together for no reason except that they want to.

And whether it starts with the slow build up, or the sudden burst, or the long, swelling ache, it’s going to be him on a path, or slung between two people on the couch and a few on the floor, with the slow, easy roll of everyone laughing at once.

 

 

 

end.


End file.
